


Odalisque

by skatedaddy



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Abuse, Abusive Relationships, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bill has issues, Depression, Drug Addiction, Emotional Manipulation, Enemies to Friends, Friends to Enemies, Implied/Referenced Sex, Internalized Homophobia, Loss of Innocence, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Destruction, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred, Verbal Abuse, richie really needs a hug, richie's parents are pieces of shit, stan is a good friend
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-15 17:55:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12325941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skatedaddy/pseuds/skatedaddy
Summary: It's his senior year of high school and Richie isn't having an easy time. His best friend, who he's in love with, hates him. His home life is in shambles. He keeps getting involved with boys who suck. Oh, and he might have a teeny tiny drug problem.Can Bill and his friends help him before he destroys himself completely?





	1. as the light dies, horribly

**Author's Note:**

> basically way more richie angst than what was originally intended. supppper slowburn bill/richie. i had to ruin richie's life a little but it will all be okay in the end?? heed the tags!!! this story has graphic depictions of drug use bc i am a user. really though it's a sweet and sad story i hope you like it. all characters at 18+
> 
> ps: leave me a comment and let me know what you think/would like to see!  
> pps: if you notice any spelling errors/typos etc just let me know so i can fix them! i beta my own stories and i'm always really high so ya there's probably some i missed

It’s evening now, with the sky blooming from pink into purple and bruising into blue. The air has that humid, muggy quality that tends to come with August and Richie is pretty sure he has the flu. Sitting on the bridge overlooking the Barrens and listening to the gentle sound of the wind and the thrushes and the river he can feel fever setting thick into his skin. The water of the Kenduskeag rushes on below him, higher than he’s ever seen it after an unusual amount of summer rain. 

Even as the night cools off it’s still sticky hot, and sweat bees and mosquitos fly around his face and buzz in his ear. He swats them away and blows cigarette smoke towards them, thinking he heard somewhere they’ll get tired or drunk or something and leave him alone. It’s not working so well, but he tries hard to ignore them because he’s not quite ready to leave and go home. He looks onward down the river, takes note of the large rocks jutting out of the surface and the way the water gurgles around them. He remembers playing down here with Bill and Mike and Ben and all the others, what, six years ago? He can’t quite remember what they did. He thinks they might have had a fire. Now they don’t come down here anymore, because they’re too old to do things like play guns or build dams. They mostly all still hang out, but it’s not as often. And they never come to the Barrens.

It was getting dark quickly now that the sun had dipped completely out of the sky. Richie was aware of the sound of crickets, and the heavy smell of ozone, like rain is coming. He hopes it doesn’t, and wishes he could sleep out here, then wonders what’s stopping him. No one’s going to miss him at home, no one’s going to be sober enough to notice whether or not he was there, and beyond that no one was going to care whether or not he was there. The whole reason he had come here in the first place was so he wouldn’t have to be there. 

Richie didn’t like to talk about his home life much, and there was a reason for that. What was he supposed to say? His mother was a terrible alcoholic, who tended to get nastier the drunker she was. His father was barely in the picture, and it was no secret in the family that he was cheating on his mom. Their marriage was in shambles, and Richie bore the brunt of it. The only time they paid him any attention was when he was their target. He wondered why they didn’t just get a divorce. 

So there wasn’t much to talk about, and there wasn’t much worth going home to, and that night Richie fell asleep on the bridge under the stars, listening to the sound of the bullfrogs and the crickets and the Kenduskeag. When he awoke the light was yellow and misty, and he rode his bike home smelling still of night air and dew. His father’s car isn’t in the driveway, and his mother has passed out on the couch with the TV still on. The morning news is playing, with some phony looking blond newscaster talking excitedly about back to school fashion. Richie doesn’t want to think about the fact that school is starting in a few days. He turns off the TV and heads into the kitchen, determined to find something to eat. The cupboards and fridge are mostly barren, but he finds an old bag of ravioli in the back of the freezer and boils them up on the stove. There’s no butter, so he sprinkles them with salt and pepper, clearing beer bottles out of the way so he has room to sit at the table and eat. 

He feels pretty numb and his house smells pungently of old liquor and beer and he wishes someone besides him would care. But no one cares because his mother’s so drunk she wouldn’t notice if the house was on fire and his father spends most of his time at work or in hotels with strange woman. No one cares at all but Richie spends the day cleaning the house anyway because he can’t stand the sight or the smell any longer and as he scrubs his mother’s vomit from off the floor around the toilet all he can think about how this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

His mother wakes up around four, when Richie is in the kitchen, finishing the dishes. She enters the room with a grumble, not mentioning the absence of beer bottles from the counters and tables,or the freshly mopped floor. She sits down at the table and lights a cigarette, staring blankly out the window. Richie shuts off the water and dries his hands with a towel, starting a pot of coffee for his mother.

“Hey mom?” She briefly glances at him, her eyes coffee, but says nothing. Richie presses on; “School starts next Tuesday.” 

There’s a moment where she stares at him and says nothing, and Richie feels nervous. The coffee percolating suddenly seems very loud. “What’s your point?” She asks, taking a drag of your cigarette.

“Yeah. I, uh. Kinda need some school supplies.”

“Like what?” She demands, her demeanor growing more and more irritated.

“You know, binders, folders, paper...All that good stuff.” 

“What’s wrong with the stuff from last year?” Richie shrugged.

“They’re kind of falling apart.”

She rolled her eyes at him turning away. The coffee had finished and Richie poured her a cup, setting it in front of her. She pulled a small silver flask from the pocket of her bathrobe and poured a nip into her coffee before taking a sip.

“Ask your father.”

Richie frowned. “But Dad’s never home.”

“And why is that, Richie?” She snapped. Richie wished he had kept his mouth shut, since it was well known to be a touchy subject. His mother absolutely detested his father, and sometimes Richie thought she detested him, being a by-product of his father. He just stares at her and says nothing because he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. His mother snorts. “Your father doesn’t give a shit about me or you.” 

“I know,” he says softly, and leaves the kitchen. He’s spent all night sleeping outside and all day cleaning his house so he’s feeling rather scummy and decides that before he can do anything else he needs to take a shower. He spends a long time under the spray, trying to think about nothing but instead thinking about everything, and when he finally gets out and gets dressed he decides it might be a good idea to take a walk and clear his mind. 

When he leaves the house his mom is drinking wine and watching some kind of courtroom show Richie would describe as disturbingly boring. He knows she can’t be that drunk yet because she’s still using a wine glass instead of chugging straight from the bottle, but she doesn’t so much as look his way as leaves. 

Evening is just creeping in as he starts walking north, towards the center of town and the park. He lights a cigarette, enjoying how it feels to be out of the house, and how pretty everything looks at this time of day, where the crest of the sun is just barely visible over the rooftops and the streetlights were just beginning to turn on. He passes a man mowing his lawn, and two pug dogs playing in a yard. He turns off his street onto the one that will take him to the main road and he’s only made it a few steps down before he can hear someone calling his name.

He turns around only to see Stanley Uris speed walking towards him. Stanley Uris never runs. As he gets closer he smiled at Stan and calls out, “Well, look who it is. I thought I told you to stay off my turf?” 

“Fuck off,” Stan tells, him, as the two begin walking together. “What are you doing out?”

“Just enjoying the lovely evening,” Richie says, a bit sarcastically. “What about you?”

“My mom sent me to the store. She needs arugula to finish dinner.”

“Holy shit, you can’t have dinner without that,” Richie said in mock awe. 

“You know it’s actually really good for you.”

The two walk together for a while, talking mostly about how school was about to start and how things were going to be so different now that they’re seniors. Richie feels like every teenager probably feels like that, but he doesn’t mention it to Stan, and he wonders if things will really be any different at all. “Are you excited to see everyone again?” Stan asks him.

“Well, I saw Eddie last week, so I’ve had my fill for a while,” he’s joking, of course. “I saw Ben and Mike at the fair, and I see Bev every night in my dreams, so…” 

“What about Bill? When was the last time you saw Bill?” Stan asks, and Richie’s stomach immediately twists into tight, painful knots. He doesn’t need to think about the question but he pretends to. 

“I think it was…. Probably around the last day of school, before summer.” 

“It’s really been that long?” Stan sounds surprised. “I didn’t realize that. You guys got in a stupid fight, right?”

“Yeah,” Richie says numbly. His last encounter with Bill had not been a good one, at all. Richie had always had a thing for his best friend- like, a thing. It had taken a while for Richie to accept the fact that he was gay and even longer for him to accept the fact that he was in love with his best friend. For years he managed to repress those feelings and keep his fucking mouth shut, which was incredibly impressive for him, but one day he had to go and fuck everything up, as he was prone to do. It was one of the last few nights before school ended and Bill and Richie had spent the day wandering aimlessly and had wound up back at Bill’s house to watch movies. Bill’s parents weren’t home and the boys shared a joint (courtesy of Richie) and curled up dangerously close to each other on the couch, and Richie, stoned and caught up in a moment he was clearly misreading, confessed his attraction to his friend.

Bill, obviously, did not take it well. Colorful things were said, pillows and even a tv remote were thrown, and the end result was Richie leaving, too angry to even grab his shoes, and storming barefoot all the way home to cry in his shower. He never got those shoes back, and it took several weeks before he stopped crying in the shower. So, yeah, Richie and Bill had issues. Stan bringing it up didn’t help, and it was one of the things Richie was most dreading about the return of the school year, because that meant seeing Bill, the one he was in love with, the one who called him disgusting and faggot, every day from now til May. 

Stan didn’t know the full details of the story, of course, and didn’t know it was a subject better off not being brought up, but he picked up on Richie’s tension over the question and chose to change the subject. The two talked a bit more until they parted ways at the grocery store where Stan went in to buy what Richie referred to as his “precious arugula” and Richie kept moving forward where he walked the trails that wound through the park and smoked cigarettes and tried to clear his head. 

Eventually it started raining, and as Richie reluctantly began his walk back home he thought of the previous night, sleeping out on the bridge over the Kenduskeag, how he had smelled the ozone and thought it might rain. He wished it would stop, and that he wouldn’t have to go home.

\----

 

It’s still raining the day school starts. It seems like it’s never going to stop, and like the sky is never going to clear up and stop being so gray and sad and ugly. Richie feels nervous and sick to his stomach as he pulls himself together, brushing his teeth and getting dressed. Any reason to leave the house is a good reason but god he really isn’t ready for school to start. He’s quiet as he moves along, because his mom is still sleeping and if she wakes up she’ll be nasty and there’s already broken glass all over the kitchen floor and Richie sees no need to add to it. He doesn’t eat breakfast because there isn’t any food, and when he leaves with his backpack and umbrella and sandals he really misses the sweet pair of Nikes he left at Bill’s house.

Before he was in highschool and friendship actually meant something Bill or Eddie or Stan would usually wait for him at the corner and they would walk to school together. Now it was every man for himself, so Richie walked to school alone, and as he watched the other kids walking with groups of their friends he couldn’t help but feel lonely. He knew he had friends and he knew his friends loved him but most of the time when he looked around he found himself alone, and he can’t tell if it’s him or if it’s them or if it’s just flat out what he deserves. He wonders if there are people who exist only to love but never to be loved back and he thinks if there is such a thing he’s probably one of those people.

After three years the high school is familiar to him and it doesn’t take him long to find his locker. He’s shoving his backpack onto the hook and trying to remember where he needs to go from homeroom when he hears a voice that is all too familiar and can’t help but swing around. Sure enough, a few lockers down, also shoving his backpack up onto a hook, is Bill Denbrough. He’s not talking to Richie, of course; he’s talking to one of his dorky friends, probably someone in the Writing Club. He notices Richie too and shoots a glare at him but that’s all, and Richie quickly looks away, gulping. Is he really going to have to spend the whole year a few lockers down from Bill? His face is red and he feels humiliated and like he’s going to cry. Maybe, he thinks, he can go down to the office and try and change his lockers. But they’re going to want to know why and Richie isn’t going to know what to say. He slams his locker shut and starts walking quickly in the opposite direction of Bill and is so focused on just getting away that he doesn’t notice Eddie sneaking up behind him and nearly yelps when he feels a tug on his backpack.

The boys say their hellos and since Eddie has economics first period with Richie they head to class together. Richie’s missed Eddie, who he hasn’t seen much over the summer, and it feels good to have a friend in his class, especially since he’s still frazzled about the locker situation. He’s even happier to find that both Eddie and Stan are in his second class, but the happiness is short lived when he walks, alone, into his third period english classroom and immediately locks eyes with Bill Denbrough. 

It’s not like Richie didn’t think that him and Bill sharing a class (or even classes) was anything outside the realm of possibility, but actually having it happen made his breath hitch in his chest. He took his seat in the farthest spot from Bill, tucked in the corner of the room, and wished he was dead. He can’t help but steal glances at Bill and each time he does he feels disgusted with himself because as much as he wants to hate Bill all he can think when he looks at him is how broad his shoulders look, how nice his red hair shines. He’s miserable, wondering why he’s destined to have so much love for someone incapable of loving him back. His heart hurts. The class seems like the longest of his life.

The first few weeks of school drag as, as they tend to do. It’s not easy to do calculus homework with his parents in the background screaming at each other, and his grades aren’t what they used to be. Other than that, he thinks he’s doing a pretty good job at acting like his usual self. He talks a lot, laughs a lot, makes more jokes than necessary. His mouth is a faucet that never seems to stop running, and half the time even he doesn’t know half of what’s coming out of it, but that’s just fine with him. It’s easier to crack jokes when people bring up his mother than to admit she got drunk and smashed all of her wedding china, leaving him to sweep up the glass. It’s easier to poke fun of Ben for his taste in music or Eddie for his overbearing mother than to admit to his friends that his dad spends more money on sex than on food and that most nights he fell asleep wishing he wouldn’t wake up.

It finally starts cooling down towards the middle of September and Richie catches a cold after another night of sleeping out at the Barrens. There’s no rest at his house where his mother is drunkenly stabbing photos of his father with a kitchen knife so he spends most of his weekend over at Stan’s, sniffling and miserable. Mrs. Uris feels sorry for Richie and puts him up in the guest room, and Stan hangs out with him and they talk and read comics but mostly Richie just sleeps. Richie is asleep when Eddie called Stan to ask about Richie, and Stan tells him Richie’s sick because he slept outside overnight.

“Well why would he do that?” Eddie asks, even though he mostly knows the answer.

“Because he doesn’t want to be home,” Stan said simply. Everyone had their own suspicions about Richie’s homelife but Richie never talked about it neither did they. It was hard to talk to Richie about anything serious, anyway. He took everything as one big joke, and trying to get him to show any kind of emotional vulnerability was like trying to squeeze water from a rock. You could probably torture him and he’d only laugh in your face. 

There’s a pause where there’s nothing but dead air coming in over the phone, then Eddie says, “Well tell him I hope he feels better.”

“I will,” Stan promises, and hangs up. When he glances in on Richie he’s still asleep, bangs stuck to his feverish forehead and a half glass of water on the bedside table, next to his glasses. His mother keeps Richie home from school on Monday and Tuesday and on Tuesday night she drops him off, with some reluctance, back at his house. As she watches his head up the path to the door she can’t help but feel sad and scared for the boy, but she pushes the thought from her head and decides she’ll stop at the market and pick up some arugula for dinner.

Towards the end of September it gets warm again, and everywhere you go there’s an old person talking about how “we’re gonna have an Indian summer”. Richie’s bored of school and tired of feeling so uncomfortable around Bill, who’s only so much as glared at him the past few weeks, and has been spending most of his time at bookstores, trying to read as much as he can out of comic books before they catch on to him and and kick him outs. It’s on one of these adventures he meets Buddy Hollandaise, who is a few inches taller than Richie and has hair a few shades darker than Richie and perfectly straight teeth and is incredibly handsome, or so Richie thinks. He doesn’t just say that, of course, the two talk about comics, because Buddy likes Sandman too, and eventually they leave the store and walk together down the nature trails at the park and smoke cigarettes.

Richie is glad he met Buddy, and for the next few days the two hang out and talk like friends and Richie is happy with that. He loves his friends to death but there’s a distance between them lately, one he knows is his own fault, and he doesn’t feel that with Buddy. He hasn’t felt a connection to someone like this since Bill, and it catches him way off guard when one night, after they had gone to see a movie together, Buddy grabs the back of Richie’s head while the two are sitting in his car and kisses him. It’s Richie’s first kiss with a guy and it leaves him feeling dizzy and confused and delighted all at the same time. He can’t figure out what Buddy sees in him but he knows he wants to see Buddy again, so the two keep meeting up and going out and sometimes they kiss and Richie feels like he’s in heaven and pretty soon he finds himself thinking less and less about Bill, sitting only a few feet away from him in third period, or his mom, or his dad, or any other parts of his shitty life that don’t involve Buddy Hollandaise. 

On the last day of September, Buddy and Richie head just outside of town to the drive-ins. They find a spot to park, and Richie couldn’t tell you what the movie was about because they spent most of it making out. Towards the end though he happened to look up- and, in the same moment he happened to look up, three spaces down in a dark red car, Bill Denbrough looked up. Richie couldn’t tell who he was with, could only see she had long black hair, but was immediately horrified with the fact that Bill had seen him with Buddy.

He tried to tell himself it was ridiculous, and that Bill already knew he was gay so why would he care, and if he was going to tell anybody wouldn’t he have told them by now? He tried to focus on how Buddy’s lips felt nice but he couldn’t sort out the knots in his stomach and eventually he begged Buddy to leave, claiming he didn’t feel good. He risked one last glance at Bill before they pulled out but Bill was back to making out with whatever girl he was with, paying no mind to Richie or the fact that he was leaving. 

By the time Buddy dropped him off at home his stomach was miserable with anxiety. His mother was hunched over the toilet heaving her guts out, still clutching a bottle of rum as snot dripped out her nose. It only took Richie about a second before he hunched over the sink and started vomiting, the tightness in his stomach finally letting go a little. He puked until he felt better, ignoring his mother who was doing the same thing into the toilet next to him. When he finally had nothing left but dry heaves he started running cold water into the sink, splashing some on his tear streaked face. He looked down at his mother who looked up at him, face drunk red and also tear streaked, smiled, and said “I feel ya.”

\-----

October sneaks up over the weekend in a cool breeze, and by the end of second period monday morning Richie feels like vomiting all over again because he has to go sit three rows over and four seats behind Bill, the same Bill who had seen him at the drive-ins, totally making out with a guy. The same Bill that had called him a “disgusting faggot”. That Bill. That very same Bill. Richie felt like he couldn’t breath as he walked to class, and he thinks his heart actually stopped when he walked to his desk and Bill actually turned his head and followed him with his eyes the whole way. Richie shrunk in his seat and wished he could disappear and silently cursed Buddy Hollandaise, even though he knew full well he would see him again. He’s so grateful when the bell finally rings, and he catches Bill giving him another look before he leaves the classroom. 

That Wednesday he meets up with Buddy again, and this time Richie’s in a bad mood, rightfully so, because he had come home to his mother so hammered she thought he was his father and had smashed him upside the head with a wooden spoon the second he had walked through the door. Buddy asks about the bruise and Richie rather crossly tells him to lay off it. Buddy apologizes and drops the subject and the two go to the pond in the park and feed ducks and go back to Buddy’s car to make out. It’s harder for Richie to get into it, and maybe it’s because of the weird music Buddy is playing or maybe it’s the throbbing bruise on his face or maybe it’s the image of Bill burnt into his mind but something doesn’t feel right and he pushes Buddy off him and asks him to take him home.

Buddy does, but he stops Richie before he can get out of the car. “Is everything okay?” He asks.

“Of course, why wouldn’t it be?” He laughed, even though nothing was funny.

“You just seemed....I dunno. You wanted to stop tonight. And the other night, at the drive-ins.”

“It’s not you,” Richie tells him, because he doesn’t know what else to say and he can’t think of any good jokes at the moment.

“I feel like you’re not telling me something.”

“That’s not true,” Richie sighed, frustrated. “Look, I like you, okay? I like us. I like this. And if it hasn’t seemed that way then I’m sorry, but…. I don’t know what to say. Look, I have to go,” Buddy was staring straight ahead now, not looking at him.

“Yeah,” he said blankly.

“Call me?” Richie asked, opening the door of the car.

“Sure,” it was as blank as before. As soon as Richie closed the door he took off, and Richie was left staring at his taillights with the sinking feeling that he had fucked up.

That Friday Buddy still hadn’t called, and Richie and Stan were hanging out for the first time in what seemed like forever. The two were at Stan’s house, since his parents had gone out of town, and Richie had brought over one of his mother’s bottles of rum. The one good thing about having an alcoholic as a parent is the liquor cabinets never locked. They played video games for a while and bounced around the idea of watching a movie but couldn’t find anything they both agreed on and ended up just talking anyway. It was a rare occasion that Stan drank and you would expect him to be really sloppy but instead he just got real serious and deep. Richie didn’t drink much either and wasn’t exactly ready for it when Stan dropped the; “Dude, what’s been up with you lately? I feel like I have no idea what’s going on in your life,” bomb on him.

Richie floundered for a second. “I don’t know dude. Nothing’s been going on.” He wished he wasn’t quite so drunk now, because he feels like this is leading to a place where he would normally lie but he’s a terrible liar when he’s drunk. Stan squints his eyes at him.

“You’ve been weird dude. And you’re not around as much. And you’re bringing liquor to my house. And you don’t drink.”

“Well…” Richie bit his lip. “I’ve kind of been seeing someone. And things are kind of...in a weird place right now, I guess,” he finally admits.

“You’ve been seeing someone?” Stan sounds a little surprised. “Who?”

“You wouldn’t know them.”

“Them?”

“Her.”

“Her.” Stan repeats flatly. He’s studying Richie carefully, and it’s making Richie uncomfortable, like his skin is crawling. Then Stan says, “You know, I wouldn’t care if you were into guys, right?”

Suddenly, the skin on Richie’s face feels a million degrees hotter. Stan knows. Stan fucking knows. Did Bill tell him? Richie doesn’t know what to say, so he just stares at Stan, wide-eyed. 

“So it’s a guy, right?” Stan pressed, and Richi nods. He’s waiting for Stan to mock him, or tell him he’s disgusting, but Stan doesn’t. Instead he asks, “Who is it?”

It takes Richie a long time to answer, and when he does it’s quiet. “Buddy Hollandaise.”

“Buddy Hollandaise?” Stan laughs, to Richie’s surprise. “Oh god, of all dudes why him?”

“What do you mean why him?” Richie demands, offended. “What’s wrong with Buddy?”

“I dunno dude. He just reminds me of, like, Ferris Bueller.”

“Well I like Ferris Bueller, thank you very much.”

“You would,” Stan laughs, then pauses. “So things aren’t going well?”

Richie sighs. He’s sad again, thinking about Buddy. Happy Stan is accepting of him, sad Buddy hasn’t called him. He can’t win. He gets so wrapped up in thought for a minute he almost forgets to answer Stan. “We got in a fight last time we saw each other, I think. Kinda. And he hasn’t called me back.”

“You think you got in a fight?” Richie nods and Stans quiet for a moment. “What do you think the fight was about?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Do you like him?”

A pause. “Yeah. I think so.” 

“Have you guys kissed?”

“Yeah.”

“Gross,” It’s playful, not malicious.

“You’re gross,” Richie shoots back.

“Can I ask you something?”  
“Shoot for the moon, Stan.”

“Did Buddy give you that bruise on your face?”

Richie immediately goes tense. “No.”

“Who did?”

“I lost a fight with a doorknob.”

Stan looked at him like he didn’t believe him, but dropped the subject. It wasn’t long before the two decided to watch a movie afterall, and they both woke up with hangovers the next morning.

\---

It takes four more days til Richie hears from Buddy again. He calls Richie a little after six, when he assumes most people would be having dinner. Richie’s house has a strict policy of feed your damn self. He was surprised to hear Buddy’s voice at the other end of the phone, and was even more surprised when Buddy asked if he could pick him up, but he agreed and started getting ready as soon as he got off the phone. Buddy picked him up in his car and they mostly sat in silence while Buddy drove, and eventually he parked in a spot near the river under the shadow of a low weeping willow. 

“Look, Richie,” Buddy said, finally turning off the music and turning to Richie. “I really like you.”

“Yeah, that’s why you haven’t called in a week?” Richie means it as a joke but the hurt he feels bleeds into it. 

“I’m sorry. I just. I didn’t think you were into me.”

“If I wasn’t into you why would I hang out with you all the time? Why would I kiss you?” 

“I know, I know! It’s just...I don’t know, you were acting weird that night at the drive-ins. Did I do something to make you uncomfortable? Was it when I put my hand on your leg? I can ask next time if you want-”

“Christ, no, stop,” Richie lets out a laugh that’s both a laugh and a sob. “It’s not you, it’s not that, at all, that was- I liked that, it’s just....” He sucked in a breath, trying to figure out what to say. “I saw someone there. At the movie. An old friend.”

“Oh,” Buddy says simply. “Are you afraid he’s going to out you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, I mean, he already knows I’m gay, I just...I don’t know.”

“Then what’s so wrong if he sees you?”

“Look, I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” Richie’s voice comes out a little hysterical. “I know you want me to be all open with my feelings and everything that’s going on and all that crap, okay, but I can’t just snap my fingers and be that person! I’m trying, okay, and I like you, and I don’t want to talk about this kind of shit, I just want you to fucking kiss me.”

Buddy said nothing for a minute, then turned the radio back on and leaned in to kiss him.

\---

The next day at school Richie is all smiles, and Stan meets him at his locker and asks what he’s so happy about. The hallway is busy and crowded and nobody is paying attention to them except Bill, who’s three lockers down putting his things away. Richie is so distracted even he doesn’t notice Bill, and he tells Stan in a low voice,

“I saw Buddy last night.”

“And things went well, I presume?” Richie only laughed. “You guys are fucking gay.”

“Takes one to know one, Stan,” Richie retorted, and the two walked off together. Bill slammed his locker shut, suddenly irritated as all hell. He assumed this Buddy asshole was the same guy he saw necking Richie at the drive-ins, and the idea that Richie was dating someone, kissing some, gave him such a sour feeling in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t explain it. He didn’t hate Richie for being gay, but he couldn’t handle it. He knew he didn’t act appropriately when Richie came out, but he knew it had to be done. So why did the feeling in his stomach hearing about Richie and his stupid date with stupid Buddy feel so much like sickening jealousy? 

He had no right to be mad about some other boy putting his lips on Richie, his hands on Richie, it didn’t make sense. There was no reason for Bill to be mad about it. But he was, and he didn’t know how to deal with those feelings and every time he saw Richie it only made him more and more upset. He hated how Richie made him feel, the anger that night at the drive-ins, the worry when Richie came to school with a bruise all his face and all Bill could do was wonder silently who put it there, the vile jealousy Richie made him feel just now, standing three feet away from him and talking about how happy is because he met up with Buddy last night. And of course, all the confusion, because why is he so jealous in the first place?

Bill doesn’t know Buddy Hollandaise, but he knows he wants to kick his ass.

\---

Richie knew the day would come where he would find himself sitting in the guidance office being asked if “everything was okay at home” because his grades were slipping. He just hadn’t expected it to come so soon. It’s mid-october and mostly his mind is on Buddy, and Halloween parties, and how it’s kind of cute that his mom started buying more hard ciders than usual lately. He doesn’t concern himself much with homework anymore because the screaming never stops in his house til one of his parents passes out or his dad leaves. He figures no one cares anyway, and there’s no real point in doing well in school or going to college because he has no one to impress or let down. Now he finds himself staring at the rather long and skinny nose of the guidance counselor, Mr. Horne.

Richie goes through the whole routine of telling him that there’s nothing wrong with his home life, he’s just stressed, too much pressure, blah blah blah. He even throws in an added bit of having girlfriend troubles, which he thinks is a nice touch. 

“Richard, you do realize this is a crucial year for you,” Mr. Horne tells him. “This is the year you start applying for college.”

“I’m not going to college,” Richie tells him simply. Mr. Horne seems surprised.

“Richard, up until this year you’ve had remarkable grades.”

“Yup.”

“Why don’t you want to college?”

“Don’t feel like it.”

This seemed to frustrate the older man, and Richie just wished he would be dismissed and allowed to go back to class. Pretending to care about calculus was better than dealing with this. He feels anxious and like he just wants to move. “What do you intend to do then, Richard?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You don’t think that it’s important to know?”

“I don’t know.” Mr. Horne eyes him wearily. 

“Richard, you’re bright enough that you could do just about whatever you set your mind to. You could get into prestigious schools. Whatevers going on in your life, there’s nothing worth throwing that away for.”

Thanks for the inspirational speech, Richie replies snarkily in his head. For once he’s able to hold his tongue, only to get him out of the situation; “I’ll think about it.”

“I hope you do,” Mr. Horne stares at him a few long moments longer, then sighs. “You can go back to class. I’ll see you soon, Richard.”

\----

“I think I’m going to bring Buddy to Ben’s party,” Richie tells Stan as the two walk down the hall together towards the front doors of the building. “Not as like, a date or anything. Just as a friend.”

They leave the building, squinting at how bright it is as they make their way down the front steps of the school. Stan frowns. “Am I gonna have to hang out with him?”

“Your presence would be appreciated, monsieur,” Richie tells him with a terrible french accent. He’s looking over at the line of school busses and further beyond to the houses lining the other side of the street opposite the school. “Buddy’s really nice,” he adds, dropping the accent.

“Yeah, like, too nice. He’s weird.”

“You’re one to talk, Stanny, you’re weird as shit. You have a dead bug collection.”

“I’m into entomology, Richie. It’s not weird.”

“It’s some serial killer shit dude.”

“It’s not serial killer shit! You used to burn ants dude. That’s serial killer shit.” The two walked and argued about which of their behaviors constituted as ‘serial killer shit’ until they got to the corner of Richie’s street.

“You doing anything tonight?” Stan asks him, as Richie looks up the hill towards his house.

“I’m meeting up with Buddy.” 

“Right,” Stan says, “Well I hope you have fun. Use protection.”

“You’re disgusting,” Richie tells him, though he appreciates the joke, and the two part ways. Richie’s house is empty when he gets home, and it’s empty when he hears the honk of Buddy’s horn outside on the street. He rushes out of the house and the two go see some werewolf movie down at the theater. It’s cheesy and fake but still freaks Richie out, and he squeezes Buddy’s hands a lot and somewhere in some dark corner of his mind he wishes it was Bill but that thought makes him feel sick. After the movie they go for a quick walk and smoke a joint together and then Buddy drops him off and gives him a kiss goodnight. Richie comes inside to find his mother passed out on the stairs, but he’s decidedly too stoned to move her or do anything about it so he sits on the couch and turns on the TV, keeping the volume low. 

He turns on The Simpsons but he’s mostly zoned out and he can’t stop thinking about how nice Buddy is and how it gives him an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach that he can’t figure out. Why is Buddy so nice, all the time? Richie knows he’s not that easy to tolerate. He knows there’s nothing special about him. Buddy is so kind and open and direct about his feelings, and Richie hates him for it because anything involving confronting his feelings was too much for him. Over the years he’s worked so perfectly to put himself into this role as the Trashmouth, and that’s all he could be. He doesn’t like to think about how he feels much less talk about it but Buddy loves talking about feelings and being overly nice and in some fucked up way it’s driving Richie nuts. He’s disgusted with himself, because he knows Buddy deserves someone who’s actually capable of accepting the love he has to offer, and he wishes Buddy wasn’t so damn nice. He wishes Buddy would snap at him, or yell at him, or make some kind of snide comment about him instead of all the unconditional love and kindness bullshit because, fuck, that was the one thing Richie didn’t understand or know how to handle. 

He’s torn from his thoughts by the sound of the front door opening and he turns to see his father. His father glances at him, then glances at his mother, asleep on the stairs. Without saying anything he simply walks around her and disappears upstairs. After a moment Richie could hear the sound of water running through the pipes as the shower was turned on. He turned his attention back to the tv, still unable to get his relationship with Buddy off his mind.

\----

Halloween came on a Sunday that year and Ben’s halloween party came on a Friday. Richie, already having a bad day, took a bottle of wine and started pre-gaming almost immediately after school. He had a decent buzz when Buddy picked him up, and he carried the bottle of wine into the car with him, almost empty now. Buddy gave him a strange look.

“I like your costume,” he tells Richie, with a little laugh. Richie looks down at himself. He’s wearing a red sweater and black slacks. Buddy, on the other hand, is wearing a hat and an eyepatch. 

“What are you supposed to be?A homeless person?” Richie asks him. Buddy looks a little hurt.

“I’m a pirate. See, I have a hook hand,” He holds up his hand to show Richie.

“It’s a nice hook,” Richie mumbles, and Buddy starts pulling away from the curb and back onto the street. Buddy’s talking excitedly about the party and Richie has the window down and is slurping the last wine out of the bottle and feeling a little sick to his stomach. He thinks he’s drunk, and he wishes Buddy would stop talking because he’s so sick of everything coming out of Buddy’s mouth being so damn nice and genuine and pure. Richie wishes Buddy could see he didn’t deserve it, and he leans his head out the window and let the cold and fresh air of October hit his face. It gives him a head rush, and for a second he escapes the chatter.

It’s not long before he can’t take it anymore and, because the alcohol in his system makes it seem like a good idea, he interrupts Buddy in the middle of his sentence on how nice Richie looked that evening and asks him to “just stop.”

Buddy is confused. “What’s wrong? What did I say?”

“Nothing, everything. Just stop talking.” Richie’s head feels like it’s swimming.

“Richie, what’s wrong?” Buddy repeats, and Richie snaps a little.

“You’re too damn nice. All the time. Like, every word out of your mouth. I can’t fucking stand it.”

Buddy looks at him for a minute with his mouth hanging open, then his eyes snap back to the road. “I’m too nice? How is that a thing, Richie?”

“I don’t know, Buddy, but it’s like you’re only ever nice. You don’t get mad at me, you don’t yell at me, I don’t understand you, it’s fucking weird.” Richie would not be saying any of this if he wasn’t drunk. He wishes he had skipped downing the bottle of wine but it was too late now to go back and he couldn’t stop himself from poking the bear and spiraling his whole life downward, down into the pits where it belongs. 

“So you think it’s weird that I’m not mean to you?”

Richie blinks. “I think it’s weird you’re a fucking robot.” That comment seemed to get Buddy’s goat a little, as his grip on the steering wheel got tighter. 

“So because I don’t yell at you, I’m a robot.”

“You don’t show any emotion other than happy.”

“And it hasn’t occurred that maybe I’m just happy to be with you?” Richie doesn’t know how to respond to this. He literally cannot fathom someone being that happy just to be around him. “You know, Richie, I think this is a problem with you, not me. You’re mad at yourself.”

“You,” Richie spits bitterly, “don’t know shit.”

They were approaching Ben’s house now, with Buddy searching for a place to park. He was ignoring Richie for the moment, which only aided in Richie’s drunk anger. “For the love of god, Buddy, will you do something? Say something? Yell at me? Do anything?”

Buddy’s head snapped to look at him. “Jesus christ, Richie, do you hear yourself right now? Do you know how fucked up you sound?”

Richie doesn’t say anything, only stares out the window. “You actually want me to yell at you,” Buddy pressed, with a sort of nervous laugh. “I can’t do this shit, Richie.” 

“Then don’t,” Richie finally throws open the car door. “Just go, if you can’t do it.”

“You know, Richie, I really like you,” Buddy tells him. “But I think your idea of love is toxic.” With that Buddy’s car is rolling away, and Richie can hear the noise of the party going on inside Ben’s house but it sounds like it’s so far away. He watches Buddy til he disappears and then his legs start walking, carrying him numbly towards the side of the house. He collapses on the ground next to the trash cans and, drunk and freshly dumped, starts crying. All he can think about is what Buddy said to him, and how he fucked everything up, and how all he’s ever going to do is fuck things up because he’s a bomb that destroys everything he touches.

He’s crying into his knees when Eddie finds him.

“Richie?” The smaller boy asks, and Richie freezes a moment, before furiously wiping at his eyes with his sleeve. He suddenly notices it’s cold and that he’s shaking, and Eddie doesn’t say anything for a second but he can feel him standing over him, feel the way he’s staring at him. “What are you doing?” He finally asks, and Richie snorts.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m sitting in trash,” Richie says miserably. “I’m a trash person sitting in trash being trash,” and with that he was crying again.

“Aw geeze, Richie, get out of the trash,” Eddie can’t condone this behavior but he’s almost never seen Richie cry and he isn’t sure what to do. When Richie shows no signs of movement he sighs and sinks down to sit next to him, being careful not to sit on anything that even remotely resembled trash. He peeks around quickly to make sure no one’s watching and puts his arm around Richie. “What’s wrong?” Richie shakes his head.

“I’m a bad person, Eddie,” his voice is heavy with spit and tears. “‘M fucked up.” 

Eddie can smell the alcohol on Richie’s breath from this range but he doesn’t comment on it. It’s scaring him, to see Richie like this, because this was so un-Richie-like. His friend doesn’t drink, and he certainly doesn’t go around crying into people’s trash. He doesn’t open up. But now he is, and Eddie doesn’t quite know what to say. 

“You’re not a bad person, Riche,” he tells him softly. “Why would you think that?”

“Because I just am,” Richie says simply, swallowing back tears. He feels like a loser, having a breakdown in front of Eddie. He feels small and pathetic and like he just wants to go home and sleep the rest of the weekend. He can feel Eddie’s gaze on him and knows if he looks into those eyes he’s going to see pain and hurt and confusion, so he stares at Ben’s fence instead. This music inside is still going on and he can feel the bass vibrating down his spine. It’s cold outside and his tears feel sticky and wrong on his face. He wipes them away again and, without turning towards Eddie, says; “You should go back inside.”

“Richie, I don’t want to leave you like this,” Eddie admits, worrying his lower lip between his teeth. 

“Eddie, I’m fine. I’m just gonna go home.”

“Can I walk you?” Eddie seems so earnest, it actually pulled at Richie’s heart. He honestly thought about it for a minute, letting Eddie walk him home, telling him everything that was on his mind, letting all that weight pour off him- but then he shook his head.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Eds. Kinda want to be alone.”

“But I don’t think you should be,” Eddie argued. 

“Christ, Eddie, it’s not like I’m gonna run away and off myself.”

“I’m not saying that. I just don’t understand why you think you have to go through everything alone. It doesn’t have to be that way, Richie.”

Richie stands up, stretching out his back and his sore legs. Even with the alcohol rushing to his head, he still can’t bring himself to look at his friend.

“It’s not like that, Eds. I’m fine.” Eddie, of course, doesn’t buy it.

“You should talk to your friends about your problems, Richie.” 

“I don’t have problems.”

Eddie sighs, frustrated. “Yeah, you’re crying in the shadows outside a party because your life is so great.”

“I’m going home,” Richie says coldly, turning towards the direction on the street. He doesn’t want to talk to Eddie anymore, doesn’t want to think about Buddy anymore, doesn’t want to fucking cry anymore because god he’s just so tired.

“Yeah, you do that,” Eddie says back just as coldly. “When you’re ready to accept help, you know where to find me.”

Richie stumbles home replaying his whole encounter with Eddie over and over again in his mind. He can’t tell if he wants to be sick or if he wants to fall asleep. His mom’s passed out on the couch again with the TV on, but he doesn’t bother to turn it off, just makes him way upstairs into his bedroom. It feels like he’s spent hours staring at the ceiling before he finally fell asleep.

\---

Richie spends the whole weekend secretly hoping that Buddy will call, but the lines are dead. He’s managed to justify to himself that it’s for the best that he doesn’t see Buddy anymore, than Buddy deserves much better than him. Still, the loss stings, and he finds himself feeling sick with loneliness and guilt and self hatred. He thinks of Eddie, who probably went home and spent the night worrying about him, and hates himself. He thinks of Ben, who was probably missing him at his party, and hates himself. He wishes he could go back in time and just do things differently, but he accepts this as being what he deserves. At some point he was going to have to stop struggling against the cosmic fact that he was destined for misery.

That Sunday is Halloween and he spends it alone. He thought maybe Stan or Eddie would call to hang out but there was no such luck. He knew he was pushing them away but he couldn’t stop himself, he was like an avalanche and once he started rolling there was no stopping until he simply ran himself out. He considered calling Stan but pussied out and went to bed early that night, plagued with uneasy dreams of dead birds and missing children.


	2. your linen and limbs will fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> richie meets nicky, yo  
> nicky has the good drugs, yo  
> richie's mom is a piece of shit, yo

November starts off colder than usual and Richie wants to ask every old person what happened to their precious little Indian Summer. For a while he and Eddie avoided each other at school, but after a few days things seemed to calm down and even themselves out and, for whatever reason, the boys began talking again as if nothing had happened. Now that Buddy is out of the picture, he finds himself with a lot more free time and makes more of an effort to hang out with his friends. The first Friday of the month he bikes with Mike to the quarry.

The air is frosty and gorgeous and, as the two sit at the highest point of the quarry and look out over the woods that lead into the Barrens, he wishes he didn’t have to go home. He and Mike mostly talk and joke and enjoy each other’s company. Mike has a relaxing quality to him; he makes you feel comfortable. Richie takes out a joint and offers some to Mike but Mike is just fine as he is. Richie smokes it and they listen to the sound of the wind in the trees and even though it’s cold Richie can feel that certain type of warmth from the sun hitting his skin and hair and it feels nice. “Do you think armadillos have little funerals for each other when one of them dies?” He asks Mike, staring dreamily at the sky. 

“I dunno man,” Mike says. “I think dolphins do.”

“Yeah,” says Richie. “But, I’m talking about armadillos man.”

“I don’t think armadillos can comprehend death like that, man.” 

Richie stares at him. “That’s a fucked up thing to say, Mike.” Mike shrugs.

“I dunno man.” There’s a moment of lingering silence between the two of them, not uncomfortable but just there. Richie’s deep in thought about the social psychology of armadillos, and he wonders if armadillos have a caste systems or it’s more of a free-for-all. Mike’s mind is somewhere else. He’s watching Richie carefully and closely, trying to figure out the best way to break holes in his walls. Poor Richie has no idea.

It was Eddie who had come to Mike, desperate. He had explained what happened the night of Ben’s Halloween party, and was struggling with the fact he didn’t know what to do about it. So he begged Mike to help, because Mike just seemed naturally so good at this stuff. If anyone could get into Richie’s head, Mike could. Bill too, probably, but he wasn’t in the picture anymore, and so Eddie went to Mike.

It wasn’t like Mike wasn’t already worried about his friend. Richie was the same as he always was, except he wasn’t. He still cracked jokes, talked in voices, talked on and on and almost never made any sense, but it was somehow sadder. Like he couldn’t let himself have feelings, so he covered everything with humor. But he was starting to crack, and of course Mike had noticed. He didn’t know exactly what was going on with his friend, but he hated watching him suffer and hated even more that he was choosing to do it alone. He couldn’t imagine how terrible he would feel if he had to go through all of his hard times without his friends backing him up.

It takes him a while to figure out what he wants to say. Richie is still deep in thought about armadillos when Mike breaks the silence; “Hey, man, can I ask you something?”

“Sure Mikey,” Richie says. 

“Friday night?”

There’s a change in Richie’s mood that Mike can sense almost immediately, and Richie shifts uneasily. “Oh,” he says. “Eddie told you.”

“He’s just worried about you. We all are.”

Richie starts nervously drawing circles in the dirt, looking out over the tops of the trees. “There’s no reason to be.”

“Then what were you on about that night?”

Richie sighs and glances at his friend. Mike’s face in the sun seems like it’s glowing so heavenly, and he feels himself start to relax a little. “If I tell you, you can’t tell anyone.”

Mike locks eyes with him. “Deal.”

Richie looks away again, trying to find the right words. Sometimes he has trouble stringing together one coherent thought, and he wants badly for Mike to understand him. “Well, I was kind of seeing this person. Uh, this guy to be exact.” 

Mike doesn’t say anything except, “okay.”

“And I guess, you know, on the way to the party we broke up. I was kind of drunk, I guess, and went off. You know.”

“Went off about what?” Mike asks. 

“It’s hard to explain.” Richie’s struggling. It’s not like he doesn’t want to answer Mike’s question, but the complexities of it is a whole can of worms he doesn’t want to get into.

“Try,” Mike urges, and Richie thinks for a moment.

“He was too nice,” he finally says, and Mike is a bit perplexed.

“Too nice? What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s just- I don’t know, dude. Really.” Richie feels tears sting in his eyes but he blinks them away. He’s stoned but he still feels kind of like crying so he lights another cigarette. It’s still a nice day. He tries to focus on that.

“I don’t think you should see someone being nice to you as a bad thing, man.”

“I know.”

“You deserve to be treated nicely.” Richie wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He didn’t think Mike was a liar, but it was hard to believe him about that. Mike just didn’t know. He didn’t understand that love isn’t all roses and hugs. He didn’t understand sometimes love hurts, and it hits and slaps and bites. He doesn’t understand that to be a target is to be noticed, and that to be noticed is to be loved, and there’s no way Richie can see to make him understand that.

“I know,” Richie tells him, and it’s a lie, but it gets Mike to change the subject. When he parts ways with Richie later on he stops him and tells him,

“You know, I don’t care that you’re gay, right?” Richie smiles at him.

“I know,” he says, and that time he’s not lying.

\----

Richie wakes up to the sound of glass shattering and shoots straight up in bed, startled. He’s has to rub his eyes and blink to make sense of what he’s seeing, which is his mom, standing in a bathrobe over a pile of broken glass and liquor that was currently seeping into his carpet. The bright red digits on his alarm clock told him it was half past midnight.

“Mom?” He mumbled sleepily, confused. 

“Richard, get up,” she slurs, grabbing his arm and tugging on him. He doesn’t put up much of a fight, since he doesn’t want to wind up with glass in his foot. 

“Christ, mom, where are your slippers?” He hisses, irritated. His mom can barely walk, but he finds her pulling him out of the bedroom.

“Get in the car,” She tells him, pushing him towards the stairs. He sighs and squeezes the bridge of his nose, feeling a squeezing headache coming on. 

“Mom, I’m not getting in the car,” he says slowly. “It’s late, I want to go to bed.”

“You’re doing what I say because I’m the parent,” Richie wants to laugh at that. “You’re coming with me.” She’s pulling him out of the house, not even letting him stop to get his jacket. It’s cold and there’s a bitter wind howling through the air and he’s standing in only shorts and a t-shirt. 

“Mom, where are we going?” He demands, following her to the car.

“Just shut up and get it,” She barks, making to open the driver’s side door. Richie stops her. 

“Mom, there’s no way you’re driving. You can’t even keep both eyes open.”

“I’ll do whatever the fuck I want.”

“Seriously, Mom, you need both eyes to drive.”

“Fine,” she sneers, thrusting the keys at him. “You drive.”

Realizing this is as close as he’s going to come to winning this battle Richie does what he’s told, sighing. It’s late and he only has his learner’s permit and he’s lucky he had the good senses to put on his glasses the second he first woke.

“Where am I going?” He asks blankly as his mother slides into the seat next to him. He starts the car and immediately starts blasting the heat, but that only makes the windows fog up, so he switches it over to defrost. He’s cold and tired and just wants to go back to bed. 

“Gold Manor Motel, off the highway,” she tells him, pulling out a flask.

“Why are we going there, Mom?” He’s exasperated. 

“Would you just shut your mouth and drive?” She lights a cigarette, not bothering to put the window down. Richie does shut up, only because he feels like crying. The drive out to the motel is long and silent, save for his mom’s occasional hiccups. She’s much quieter than usual, but that scary, crazy kind of quiet and Richie is just trying to focus on driving because fuck if he really knows what he’s doing, it’s not like he had anyone to teach him. He’s just kind of winging it, and, had he not felt so shitty, he might have been a little proud of the fact that he had gotten them there in one piece when he finally pulled into the hotel. 

The first thing he notices is his father’s car,and it then becomes painfully obvious what they were doing here.

“You see that?” His mom demands as Richie parks the car. “What do you say, you wanna go meet the whore your father’s been fucking?” 

“Not really. I don’t think you should, either.” He doesn’t know why he even bothers telling her this, since it’s not like she’ll actually listen. The next thing he knows she’s getting out of the car and screaming across the parking lot, 

“WENTWORTH! Wentworth, get the FUCK out here!” 

Lights start flickering on in various motel rooms and Richie sees people coming to the window to see what’s going on.

“Mom, get back in the car!” he yells, but she ignores him. As she screams his father’s name again, Richie is terribly aware someone is going to call the police.

After the third scream Richie is still trying to coax her back into the car when his father finally comes storming out of one of the little red doors of the motel. 

“Margaret? What the hell are you doing?” 

“What the hell am I doing? Fuck you Wentworth! Where’s your little whore?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, you don’t? Is she in there?” Richie watches his mom take off running to the hotel room, and his father taking off after her, and then a scream and the sound of glass shattering. The next sound he’s aware of is the sound of sirens in the distance, and that’s when he makes one of those stupid impulsive decisions he was inclined to make and leaned over to slam the passenger door shut before peeling out of the parking lot. His mom, hearing the tires screech, came running out of the hotel room, chasing the car down and screaming at him. Richie just kept driving, speeding until he was a safe distance from the hotel and then feeling like his lungs were going to collapse because fuck he barely knew how to drive and he was alone and he just left his mother at some seedy hotel off the highway.

It’s a miracle he makes it home without being pulled over and it takes forever for him to fall back asleep. He lays awake until the sun starts coming up, listening for any noise or sign that someone had come home. He hears nothing and eventually falls asleep, waking up to a call from his father around noon the next day telling him that his mother had been taken into police custody, and had spent a night in the drunk tank, and that an officer would be giving her a ride home soon. Then he asks if the car’s okay, and Richie tells him that it’s fine. Of course his father would be more worried about the car than the kid who was left to drive it. 

When his mom comes home she’s in about the worse mood he’s ever seen her in and the first thing she does is slap him hard across the face. 

“Ow! What the hell?” He touches his stinging cheek and turns to face her, shocked. 

“That’s for leaving me to get arrested,” she spits at him, and goes over to the liquor cabinet. “What kind of son lets his own mother get arrested.”

There’s a lot Richie wants to say but he bites his tongue and instead tries to focus on making something to eat, but his mother seems hellbent on making his night a living nightmare. She shoves him around a little, which is fine with him, but he wishes she would shut up. She stands there, drinking from her bottle of Bacardi and berating him about everything. From “You look like a fucking girl, what, are you a faggot?” to “You’re a fucking moron and disgusting and my life would be better off without you,” he hears it all. “You can’t do anything right,” she tells him. “I fucking resent you.”

By the time she finally grows bored and retires to the couch to watch her stories Richie is ready to burst into tears. His whole body feels like it’s on fire and crawling with ants all at the same time, and his hands are shaking. There’s a bruise on his face and he’s been pushed around all day and it feels like he can barely breath, and he doesn’t know what to do, and so he goes to Stan’s.

He manages to keep himself composed the whole walk there by shutting off his brain and not thinking but he’s glad Stan answers the door because the first thing he does when he sees his friend is to burst into tears, sobbing so hysterically that for the most part no sound even came out.

Stan looks alarmed and immediately steps outside and pulls the door shut, giving them some privacy from his parents. He leads Richie over to the bench on their porch and sits him down gently. Richie is, for the most part, hysterical. He’s sobbing and breathing in quick and shallow gasps of air, and Stan thinks he likely can’t breath very well.

“Richie, Richie, you need to calm down,” Stan puts both of his hands on Richie’s shoulders, forcing Richie to twist and look at him. “You need to breath.”

Richie sobs, sucking in a deep breath of air. Stan keeps talking;

“You need to calm down so you can tell me what’s wrong, right? C’mon, dude, you gotta breath.” Stan was no stranger to panic attacks, and kept talking Richie through it until Richie’s hysterical sobbing had turned into just miserable crying. 

Stan let go of Richie, who sniffed and finally spoke, “Holy shit, I’m sorry.” It came out as more of a gasp. Stan frowned.

“Dude, don’t be sorry. What’s wrong?” Richie shakes his head. “No, seriously, dude, what happened?”

Richie covers his face with his hands for and sucks in a big gulp of air. He’s shaking and his fingers feel numb. He’s still covering his face with his hands when he says, “Fuck, dude, it’s my fucking Mom.”

There’s a brief pause, because Stan feels a little sick to his stomach. “What happened?” He asks, a bit dully.

“It’s just- She just fucking hates me, Stan,” Richie wailed, starting to cry harder again. “She just hates me so fucking much, Stan, she fucking hates me, she just-” He breaks off and just cries and Stan snakes an arm around him, pulling him into a hug. 

He lets Richie cry into his shoulder until he can’t anymore, and Richie’s voice is hoarse and his eyes are red and he can’t breath through his nose at all anymore. He looks at Stan with bleary eyes and asks, “Can I stay here tonight?”

“Of course.” 

Stan’s mother watches the scene through the window but doesn’t say anything to her son. She notices the bruise forming on Richie’s face, small and light but still contrasting his pale and freckled face, and thinks of how much of a shame it is, really. Before Maggie Tozier had really started hitting the bottle hard she had been, for the most part, a pleasant presence and was even part of Stanley’s Mother’s bridge club. Now, it was nearly impossible to hold a conversation with the woman, and she was notorious for getting impossibly drunk and causing scenes in supermarkets.

Yes, she thought, watching Richie and her son retreat up to his room. It’s such a shame.

\---

Richie returns home and his days are, for the most part, back to normal. His mother is a bit colder than usual, but he spends most of his time at home locked in his room, so it’s hard to notice. He hasn’t seen his father since the night at the motel, and he doubted he would for a while. 

The middle of the month is approaching when Richie first meets Nicholas “Nicky” O’Donald. 

It didn’t take much for Bev to convince Richie to come to a party at her friend from her swim team’s house. Any excuse to get out of the house on a Friday night was a good one, and lately partying seemed like a decent way to forget what was going on at home. He didn’t always drink, sometimes he just smoked, but it was nice to get away and listen to music and dance with people and forget who he was for a little while.

He’s outside smoking on the deck with Nicky approaches and introduces himself. It doesn’t take long before Richie notices that Nicky is flirting with him, and he can’t help but find Nicky incredibly attractive.

In a weird way, Nicky kind of looks like Bill, except maybe a little taller and a little skinnier. He’s got red hair and freckles that burst out over his nose and piercing blue eyes, the kind that capture you in them. He decides it’s not going to hurt anything if he flirts back, and he finds himself spending most of the night hanging out with Nicky. They do shots together, and talk, and Richie is having a fantastic time when Nicky asks him if he wants to go back to his car.

Richie isn’t completely sure what he was expecting when he got into the car, but it wasn’t for Nicky to reach into the inside pocket of his jacket and pull out a bag of white powder. Richie just stares, and Nicky smiles at him. He has a charming smile.

“Cocaine,” Nicky tells him. “Coco. You want some?”

Richie hesitates. Nicky is looking at him so eager, and Nicky is so cute and this moment is so cool, but he’s never done anything harder than weed or alcohol. He’s heard about cocaine before, but not much, and he had never planned on actually being offered any. But here he was, with this hot interesting guy offering him cocaine in his car, and some loud, nagging part of him really didn’t want to say no.

His resolve breaks when Nicky raises an eyebrow and sing-songs, “It’ll be fun.” 

And so Richie finds himself snorting cocaine off the center console of Nicky’s car. He’s a bit nervous, but he tries not to show it and when Nicky tells him to do two lines he doesn’t question it. He blows both of them quickly up the same nostril and falls back into the seat of the car, trying to decide what he thinks of the sensation. It doesn’t taste much like anything, except maybe the way gasoline smells, and at first it burns but then his face goes numb at it doesn’t hurt at all. He feels his heart start to race a little, but in a good way, and suddenly he is overcome by how powerfully good he feels.

It’s amazing, unlike anything he’s ever felt. Like everything that had been weighing him down was lifted off, and now he was free and he could do anything he wanted. A surge of power washed over him, and he felt like if he wanted to he could get out of the car and run a whole marathon. It’s a rush of speed and power and euphoria and it hits him hard and he looks over at Nicky with the biggest smile on his face and Nicky smiles back.

“You like it?” Nicky asks and Richie nods, letting his head roll back and his eyes roll up, staring out Nicky’s open sunroof at all the stars. 

“I feel amazing,” He tells him. “Like, I’m so happy I could die.” Nicky laughs at that.

“Let’s go for a ride.” 

And so Nicky takes him out in his car, takes him to the very back roads of Derry. Had Richie not just snorted two lines of cocaine he might have felt bad for leaving Bev at the party, but in the moment he felt so good he didn’t care. Nicky cranked the radio up and lit a cigarette while Richie kicked off his shoes and stood up in his seat to stick his head out the sunroof. The sensation of the cocaine and the air hitting his face was incredible, and he screamed. When he finally pulled his head back in and lit his own cigarette he had tears streaming down his face, but he was happier than he’d ever been. 

Nicky drove them around for awhile, pushing a speed that would have normally terrified Richie, and eventually pulled into a little dirt road and parked, hiding them amongst the trees. He turned the dash light on in his car and dumped more cocaine out on the console, and Richie did another line. This time he found he really liked the way it felt to snort it, liked how warm and soft the dollar bill Nicky used as a straw was. 

“So tell me about yourself,” Nicky puffs on his cigarette, his gaze lingering on Richie. He leaves just one of the lights on, so they can see each other but so that it’s not too bright. His car smells like leather and cigarette smoke. 

“I don’t think there’s much to much to say,” Richie laughs. 

“Hmm. So you’re one of those tough nuts to crack.” Richie blushes and looks away. 

“There’s not much to crack. What about you?”

And so Nicky tells him about himself, and Richie finds out that Nicky likes classic litature, and music, and tattoos, and selling and doing cocaine. Nicky tells Richie he thinks he’s really cute, and Richie tells him he feels the same and the two end up snorting cocaine and making out until the sky is starting to get light again. 

Nicky breaks away from the kiss and lights a cigarette. “It’s getting late,” he says, glancing at the clock on the radio. “You need to be home?”

“I mean, no one’s waiting for me,” Richie says honestly. “But the sun is gonna come up soon.” 

So Nicky takes him home, and they’re mostly quiet now and listening to music. Richie is tired but awake at the same time and it’s a weird feeling, like his body knows it needs sleep but isn’t ready for it. When they get to his house Nicky stops him before he can get out of the car.

“Give me your number. I want to see you again.” 

Richie writes it down for him on the back of his pack of cigarettes. 

“I’m gonna call you, Richie Tozier,” Nickie says, and gives him a long kiss. Richie’s glad it’s too early for any of the neighbors to be up yet, because he doesn’t want Nickie to stop. Eventually he heads inside and Nickie heads home, and he lays down in bed and tries to fall asleep but finds he can’t. Eventually he gives up and wanders downstairs, where he thinks about making himself a bowl of cereal but realizes he isn’t hungry. He finally sets about cleaning the house, and around noon, just as he’s starting to get tired, he gets a call from Beverly.

“So,” she says, and it sounds like she’s puffing on a cigarette. “Where’d you disappear to last night?”

Richie immediately feels guilty, more-so now that the effects of the cocaine have worn off. “Shit, sorry. I, uh, met someone.”

“Was that someone Nicky O’Donald? Because that’s who I thought it was.” 

“Uh, I guess so.”

There’s a long and awkward pause. “Well,” says Beverly. “I mean. Don’t get me wrong, Richie, I don’t care that it was, you know. A guy. But I know Nicky O’Donald, and he’s bad news.”

“He’s really nice, Bev,” Richie’s too tired to put any energy into his argument. “He’s not a bad guy.”

“I’m just saying, I don’t think you should see him. He’s bad news. You’re better than that.” Richie would have laughed if he wasn’t so damn exhausted. 

“I’ll think about it, Bev. Look, I gotta go.” He doesn’t give her much chance to argue before he’s hanging up the phone and stumbling upstairs. He falls asleep about as soon as his head hits the pillow, and when he wakes up later that evening, around eight o’clock, all he can think about is how much he missed what he was feeling last night and how he hoped Nicky would call soon.

\----

It hadn’t taken long for Nicky to call Richie back, and those first two weeks they hung out nearly every night. Richie wouldn’t admit to anyone where he was going or why he was so busy, but from the disapproving looks he got from Beverly he suspected she might know. Richie doesn’t care; he likes going on dates with Nicky. It’s not like Buddy, who was so pliant and polite. Nicky was witty, smart, charming, but he also called Richie out on his bullshit. He got irritated about things. He was human in ways Buddy wasn’t. And, of course, he had cocaine, and Richie was really starting to love that. 

The two spend most of their time hanging out and doing drugs together, and Richie truly felt like it was the best time of his life. He didn’t go home and hurt anymore and wonder why his family couldn’t love him or why he couldn’t have anyone who cared. The coke made him feel good and powerful and incredible, like he finally had all the control he wanted. 

By the end of the month, Nicky was sending Richie homes with little rations, a few lines worth in a little dime bag. He would pass it to Richie between kisses, telling him it will hold him over. Richie finds himself snorting lines off his nightstand and even the kitchen table. It’s not like his parents are going to care. At school he slips into the bathroom to snort quick bumps, and when Stan asks him if he’s got a cold since he’s been sniffling so much Richie tells him he has allergies. 

His friends are all taken aback by the remarkable change in his demeanor, how he had gone from completely deflated to completely elated in seemingly the matter of days. It mostly confused them, except Beverly, who felt like she understood and would watch Richie with the eyes of a mother who knew her child was doing something wrong. 

He was able to talk and laugh and joke freely and frequently, the way he used to be able to. He’s not bothered by the presence of Bill in his third period class or at lunch anymore- the cocaine gives him a sense of confidence he’s never felt before, and he figured if Bill had a problem with him he could gladly fuck off. Even Bill took note of the change, but couldn’t tell what to make of it.

November ends in a series of thunderstorms, and Nicky and Richie watch the clouds roll in from the front seat of Nicky’s car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have the next almost 2 chapters written, I'm going to post the next one and then give it a couple days for the fourth chapter but please let me know what you think and what you'd like to see more of!! i basically have the rest of the story planned out so i'm not planning on making any major changes to the plot but i'll do my best to work more of what you want into the story??


	3. on a fire escape you walk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> richie loses his virginity yo  
> it's christmas and shit

December in northern Maine means, snow, and lots of it. It had come late this year but by the third day of December a neat blanket of all white had settled over their town. Richie can’t help but stare at it through the window, thinking of how it looked an awful lot like the white power he’d been snorting up his nose and, somewhere inside, wishing that it was. He wished he could go outside with a straw and just start snorting whatever he could find. It’s not necessarily a rational thought, but he finds himself so engrossed in it that he doesn’t hear the teacher call his name. 

When he finally does notice, the whole class is staring at him, Bill included, and his face suddenly feels hot and he feels like he could die. His teacher advises him to pay attention, but shit, how is he supposed to do that when all he can do is watch snowflakes melt against the window and think about that amazing white powder. He can’t, he can’t pay attention or sit still or think about anything else and it isn’t long at all before he’s raising his hand and begging to be excused to go to the bathroom.

His hands are practically shaking when he uses them to shove open the heavy bathroom doors. The boy’s bathroom, in all its hideous cerulean-tile glory, reeks like piss, but he hardly notices. It’s nothing new, and he’s alone in here for now so he better be quick. It was always such a pain waiting for the bathroom to empty out, but he couldn’t risk anyone knowing what he was doing and he was sure the sound of him sniffing and snorting would give it away. With nervous hands he pulls a little baggy out of his pocket and dumps out some fine, white powder onto the top of the toilet paper dispenser, using the razor that had been tucked in with the baggy to cut it into a nice, neat line, which he stares at for a second. He thinks about the snow, falling outside, and how frosty the air is, and how it’s the kind of cold you can feel in the base of your lungs. He thinks about how fucking disgusting it is to be snorting anything off the back of a toilet paper dispenser is, and how this bathroom is probably filthy and covered in germs. He thinks about Bill, sitting back in the classroom, listening to whatever the teacher was lecturing on about or maybe even staring out the window like Richie had been. Richie wonders if Bill looks at the snow and thinks about cocaine, and then bitterly doubts it. He doesn’t want to think anymore, and without wasting anymore time he pulls a dollar bill out of his pocket and rolls it up. The paper goes to his nose as he gets everything in one big sniff, and suddenly he’s not feeling so bad anymore. 

He wipes up the residual dust with his fingers and rubs it on his gums, not caring anymore how gross and unsanitary it is and not thinking about how many dudes have stood there pissing. One of his favorite things about cocaine is how much it makes him not fucking care. When he steps out of the stall he catches himself in the mirror- his pupils are huge, big and black, and his eyes are bloodshot. There’s a little bit of powder stuck to his nose, which he quickly wipes away, before splashing some water on his face. His hands feel clammy as he makes his way back to class, but in a way that he’s found he rather enjoys. Taking his seat and looking back out to the snow, Richie feels a lot better. 

He spends the rest of the class twitching and fidgeting around in his seat, enjoying the feeling of being high but wishing he didn’t have to waste it by sitting in class. When the bell finally rings he’s the first one out of the room, which is impressive because he’s just about the farthest from the door. He feels like he’s just so much energy that it’s boiling over, so instead of stopping at the door to his music theory class he continues on down the hallway, through the music wing and out the back door of the school.

Stepping outside into the icy cold Richie realized immediately that he had left his jacket in his longer, and for a moment debated turning around to retrieve it, but decided it wasn’t worth it. He just wanted to walk, to go, to do something, and it was really, really hard to feel cold right now. It was like he could register it, but it wasn’t phasing him. He pushed onward, then, creating fresh tracks in the school as he scurries towards the street, hoping no one was looking out any windows and watching him. 

When he reached the edge of school property and was just out of sight he paused and lit a cigarette, trying to figure out what he was going to do now. He figured he’d go for a quick walk, maybe in the park, and be back to spend lunch with Stan and Eddie. 

So he walks, and smokes, and takes in the world around him. It’s the kind of winter day that’s all around very white. The sky is white, the snow is white with little flecks of blue and pink. The air has that crisp smell of frost and ice. Winter is pretty, he thinks, besides all the ugly brown slush on the side of the road, piled up near curbs. It doesn’t take long before he forgets that he doesn’t even have a jacket on, and he doesn’t notice people giving him strange looks as he gallivants through the snow in only jeans and a t-shirt. 

He reaches the park just as he’s finishing a cigarette and immediately lights another. He stands at the gate at the mouth of the park and looks around for a second. The stream that runs through was as gray as everything else, and it was quiet today. He could hear snowbirds and wished Stan was here because he was sure Stan would appreciate it. Everything is pretty and he feels good, but he knows he could feel better if he really wanted to and so he takes the personal challenge and seeks out a bathroom and, for the second time that day, found himself snorting cocaine off a toilet paper dispenser. 

He walks along the trail that lead over the bride, singing as he walks along. “Country roads,” he says, between drags of a cigarette. “Take me home.” 

He hears the cry of crows overhead and stops to watch the river for a while, but soon finds that he can’t sit still. So he keeps walking onward down the trail, and when he runs out of trail to follow he exits the park on the south end and heads towards the Barrens. 

His footprints there are the first of the year and he appreciates the way they mar the snow, loves listening to the crunch of snow underneath his sneakers. It’s a bit slick and he almost falls but he manages to make it down the slope and heads over towards the bridge. The Kenduskeag is still high, and there’s an intense rush that comes with standing over it, coked out, and listening to the water roar underneath him. He sits down, feeling rather good about life, and laughs. “West Virginia,” he belts out into the empty Barrens, resuming his song. “Mountain mama, take me home, country roads,” He’s laughing hysterically about his own singing, almost to the point of tears. If anyone were to have witnessed it, they would have thought it to be a sad, strange sight. 

Richie has no idea how much time has passed and he’s a foolish enough man to not wear a watch, so he has no idea what time it is when he finally stands up to leave. All he knows it the coke is almost worn off and he needs to do another line, get back to school, and meet up with Nicky as soon as he can because he’s almost out. Now that he’s really coming down he takes note of how cold it is, and he stops at the gas farm to use their bathroom and snort the last of his bag up his nose. 

When he finally makes it back to school, students are pouring out of it and busses are lined up along the curb, hissing, smelling heavily of gasoline which only reminds Richie of the coke. Well shit, he thinks. So much for being back by lunch. He decides he should grab his jacket and his backpack and that’s all he’s really thinking about when he runs into Eddie, Stan, and Mike, just by the steps of the school.

Eddie was in the middle of saying something, but he immediately stops when he sees Richie. Stan follow his gaze and both their mouths fall open a bit. Richie Tozier is walking towards them in twenty degree weather in a fucking t-shirt. His lips are purple, his cheeks and nose are burnt red from the cold, and his nose is trickling blood, which he doesn’t seem to notice. His whole body is tremoring from the cold, which he also doesn’t seem to notice. Eddie’s first to break the silence, seemingly catching Richie’s attention. “Richie?” He half shrieked, tugging on his own jacket, getting cold just looking at his friend. 

“Eds!” Richie seems about as happy as a clam as he flits towards them. Eddie and Stan exchange a glance. Richie pinches Eddie’s cheeks, and his hands are freezing. “Eddie Spaghetti! I missed you!” 

Eddie, who had been staring at Richie wide-eyed, snaps out of it, and slaps Richie’s hands away. “Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?” He demands, and Richie steps back a little, cocking his head to the side.

“What do you mean?” He’s still grinning, like Eddie’s joking with him. 

“Richie, where the fuck is your coat?” Stan steps in, and when his eyes flick over to Stan the boy can’t help but notice how blown Richie’s pupils seem to be. “How long have you been out here? What the fuck happened to your nose?” 

“Oh, just a little while, and my nose? What do you-” At that moment Richie felt his face with his hand and realized his hand was now covered in blood. “Oh shit,” he stares at the blood for a second, and then laughs and looks up at Stan. “Holy shit,” he says, still laughing. “Is my nose bleeding?”

“Yeah, dude.” 

“I didn’t even notice,” Richie laughed again. “Well shit, guess I’ll tell your mom to go easy next time she sits on my face.” 

Both his friends groaned. “Beep-beep, Richie. Seriously dude, where is your coat?” Eddie gripes, and for the first time it occurs to Richie that he might look strange to his friends. 

“Relax, Eds, I’m going to get it right now. You guys gonna wait for me?” 

“I have a doctor’s appointment. My mom’s gonna have a cow if I’m late,” Eddie sounds sorry, like he doesn’t want to go. 

“I’ll wait for you,” Says Stan. 

So Richie runs into the school. After he’s out of sight Eddie looks at Stan and sighs. “There’s something wrong with him,” he tells Stan, his face distorted with worry.

“I know. I’ll talk to him,” This puts Eddie at ease a little and he starts heading home, thinking that Stan will take care of it. Stan stands near the steps and waits.

The first thing Richie does when he’s inside is dip into a bathroom, so he can wipe the blood off his face. The heat from the building fogs up his glasses, and he slips them off since he can’t see anyway. It’s because of his poor eyesight that he doesn’t notice that Bill Denbrough is in the same bathroom as him until he’s standing a few feet away from him at the sink. Bill looks at him, and if Richie could distinguish his features without his glasses he’d see the look of shock sketched across it. Richie says nothing, just pumps out a handful of paper towels which he wets with warm water and starts dabbing at the blood. Bill wants to say something, wants to ask him what happened to his face, but finds his voice lost somewhere inside his throat. He decides it doesn’t concern him anyway and leaves Richie scrubbing the blood off his face.

Richie stares in the mirror and wonders if it was the coke or the cold that gave him the nosebleed. He’s still got enough of a buzz going from the last bump he did at the gas farm, so for now he feels okay, but he knows he needs to get home and call Nicky. Once he’s sure there’s no more dried blood on his chin he heads to his locker, slipping on his coat. It’s green denim, but not army green, more like a sage green, with fur around the hood. It feels bigger on him than it did last year, and it reeks of cigarettes, but he loves it. He throws his backpack over his shoulders and reunited with Stan outside the school, the two heading towards the street.

The busses rumble past them as they walk, side-by-side. It’s louder than it was when Richie was out here earlier- now the air was alive with the sound of kids who had just gotten out of school. Stan doesn’t waste much time before asking, “Dude, what were you doing out here without a coat? Did you ditch class?”

“I went for a run. I’m trying out for cross country, you know. I hear running is great for the soul,” Richie says dreamily. Stan frowns at him.

“Beep beep, asshole. You looked frozen half to death.”

“While I appreciate the concern, Staniel, I promise that I’m fine. Fully alive, I’m afraid,” he’s using a bad british accent, trying to twist some humor into the subject.

“You didn’t notice your nose was bleeding.” It wasn’t a question and now Richie drops the act.

“I’m fine,” he repeats, plainly. “I just went for a walk.”

“What’s wrong with you, Richie?” Stan sounds exasperated, and he is. Richie’s lips are still blue from the cold and Stan wants to wring his neck. “I mean, seriously, what goes on in your mind that makes you do this kind of shit? I really wanna know.”

“Well it’s really none of your damn business, Stan,” Richie bites out. 

“Richie, you could have gotten frostbite. Or made yourself sick.” 

“And what are you, my mom?” 

“Clearly I’m not your mom, because _your_ mom wouldn’t give a shit.” Stan knows it’s a low blow but he can’t stop the words from coming out of his mouth. He’s hurt and frustrated by his friend and he just wants to get it through in Richie’s head that he can’t do shit like this. He feels immediately bad for for a second neither of them say anything.

“You know what, fuck you Stan,” Richie says softly. “What do you know?”

“Richie, I’m sorry-”

“Whatever,” Richie cuts him off. “I’m going home to see my shitty mom,” he’s walking away before he’s even finished his sentence.

“Richie, I didn’t mean it like that!” Stan calls after his friend, but Richie ignores him and keeps walking. Stan stares at his back for a while, then looks up the hill in the direction of his house and reluctantly continues on his way home. He thinks about turning around and going after Richie but decide they both need time to process what they’re feeling, so he keeps going and when he gets home his mother makes him hot chocolate and he sits in the den near the fireplace and looks at the snow falling out the window and thinks of Richie. 

Richie, on the other hand, comes home to his mother chain smoking and watching TV, bottle of Budweiser in her hand. The house, which he just cleaned yesterday, is trashed again, and as he nearly trips on an empty pizza box she wonders when the hell she had time to order a pizza. The only acknowledgement she gives him is asking him to get her another beer, which he does, thinking the whole time about what Stan said and only getting angrier. “Mom, the fridge is empty,” he tells her as he hands her another bottle. 

“Call your father,” she tells him, and sighs and goes upstairs. The first thing he does when he gets into his room is call Nicky. He tells Nicky that he wants to see him, and Nicky tells him he’ll be over in ten. He hangs up the phone and sits by the window, watching the snowflakes that are still persisting, even as the light is fading from the sky. It reminds him of the blow, and he can’t wait for Nicky to get there.

\--

It takes Richie a couple of days before he feels like talking to Stan again, but by mid-December things feel to him, for the most part, back to normal. Since the day he went walking he was trying harder to be a little less obvious about his coke use, not wanting to alarm his friends into thinking he was batshit crazy or on drugs. Sometimes it seemed like they knew, or were at least suspicious- especially Beverly and Stan- but no one said anything and Richie carried on his routine of sniffing lines throughout the day and meeting up with Nicky after school. 

He’s driving around with Nicky in his car right now, running “errands”, as Nicky called them. Really, they were driving around and dropping coke off to people, but Richie tried not to think about that aspect of it, and mostly just waited in the car when Nicky would grab his backpack from the backseat and disappear into strange houses. He doesn’t mind it so much, and likes driving around, high on cocaine, taking in all the sights and scents of Christmas. Normally he hated the holiday, but lately he had been having a hard time finding it in him to hate anything and driving around with Nicky, especially at night, the lights decorating people’s houses and shrubs and lawns all looked so gorgeous. It was like he was experiencing the holiday for the first time, and he wonders if maybe the Christmas spirit wasn’t a coke high the whole time. 

Nicky stops at 20 Neibolt street, only a few houses away from the run down old crack house. Richie has vague memories of going there as a kid and doing something, something with his friends, but he can’t quite remember what. Nicky goes inside to take care of his business and Richie stares at the dilapidated building and shivers. He lights a cigarette, unsure of why the rundown old hobo house is making him so uneasy, like his skin is crawling with ants he can’t see. He feels like something happened when he and his friends went into that house that he can’t quite remember. Had Eddie broken his arm in there? Richie is pretty sure he had, but he can’t remember how. It gave him a bad feeling.

He’s glad when Nicky finally gets back to the car, and begs Nicky for another line.

“Jeeze, you’re desperate,” Nicky tells him, but dumps a little cocaine on the console for him regardless. Richie’s not even finished snorting it before Nicky starts driving again, but this time he takes them to the Owl’s Overlook, which was a pretty nice and pretty private spot for teenagers to park. It was quite the drive to get there, especially in the winter where the back roads were slick and full of snow, but if you could make it, the view was well worth it. Up at Owl’s Overlook the whole city of Derry stretched on underneath you, and you could see all the pretty lights, and the Kenduskeag river, and rolling, rocky hills that stretched further on, past the city. 

Nicky parks and looks over at Richie, who looks particularly lovely with the orange light of the city illuminating his face. Outside, snowdrops melt into water on the windshield and the drops cast shadows on their skin. They’re listening to The Ramones, and Nicky cuts another line for Richie, watching him closely as he leans it to do it, watching the way his body arches as he sniffs loudly. It’s pretty hot, Nicky thinks, and then Richie looks up at him, big blue eyes shining behind his glasses, and Nicky leans in and kisses him.

After a few minutes of making out, Richie takes his glasses off. Nicky presses a kiss into his neck and purrs; “You’re so fucking gorgeous.” Richie laughs.

“I’m fucking crazy, is what I am,” he tells Nicky.

“Mmm,” Nicky catches his lips again. “You are. Crazy and gorgeous. I’ve never met anyone like you.”

Richie can’t help but adore the attention he’s receiving, and the surge of power and euphoria from the cocaine is only adding to it. Nicky starts touching him in ways that make his brain want to short circuit, and it doesn’t take long before he and Nicky are crawling into the backseat. Nicki has an old blanket back there he pulls over then and, high out of his mind with the Ramones still playing on the radio and the entirety of Derry laid out beneath them, Richie Tozier loses his virginity. 

\----

It’s December 23’rd, and Richie can’t believe what he is hearing. It wasn’t like he just assumed Nicky didn’t have a family; he had just assumed, given Nicky’s aloof and mysterious nature, that he and his family weren’t that close. So when he asks Nicky if they can spend Christmas together and Nicky tells him he has go visit family in New York, Richie is a bit taken aback.

“Oh,” he says, and Nicky frowns.

“I’m sorry, babe,” Nicky tells him. “I’ll be back the day after.”

“It’s fine,” Richie reassures him, smiling. His heart feels like it’s sinking into his stomach but he tries to ignore it. It was stupid, so fucking stupid, for him to have ever assumed Nicky would spend Christmas with him anyway. It was dumb. 

“You gonna be okay?” Nicky asked, eyeing him carefully. “I feel bad, leaving you.”

“It’s fine,” Richie says again. “My family just doesn’t really do Christmas, it’s not a big deal.” 

“Yeah, I take it your family doesn’t really do any holiday, do they?”

Richie shrugs, and then it suddenly dawns on him. “Wait, so you’re going to be gone for two days?”

“Almost three.”

Richie fidgets, suddenly uncomfortable. “What about...I-” 

Nicky cuts him off, knowing what he’s getting at. “I’ve got you,” he tells Richie. “Actually, I wanted to give this to your anyway, before I left. It’s your Christmas gift.” He reaches into the back seat of his car and rummages around on the floor for something, finally finding a brown paper bag. He pulls it up and hands it to Richie, who peeks inside, and can almost feel his mouth salivate.

Inside is the biggest bag of cocaine Nicky has ever given him, complete with a little Christmas bow and everything. Richie feels his heart melt a little and throws his arms around Nicky’s neck, pulling him into a deep hug. Nicky laughs.

“I knew you’d like it.”

The two make love again before Nicky drops Richie off at home and they say their goodbye’s for a little while. On the day of Christmas Eve Richie wakes up in a pretty decent mood and immediately cuts three fat lines for himself on his bedside table, snorting them as quickly as possible. Then he springs from his bed and makes his way downstairs, picking up some of the beer bottles his mom had left scattered around the night before. He spends some time cleaning the house, but soon he’s bored of that and he finds himself shrugging on his coat, determined to find something to do now that Nicky’s out of town.

He does one more line before he leaves the house, this time off the table in the hallway near the front door. He’s feeling pretty well charged and pretty good and he decides to go to Stan’s house to see if his friend is up to anything.

When Stan answers the door, he’s a little surprised to see Richie standing there. “Give me a minute,” he tells Richie, and disappears inside. He returns a few moments later, wearing his coat this time, and steps outside with Richie. 

“I’d invite you in, but I have family over,” he looks at Richie, who’s twitchy and energetic disposition is giving him an uneasy feeling. He was used to Richie bouncing off the walls, but not to this level. There was something off about his eyes, too, something that made Stan’s stomach church. He couldn’t quite place it but he knew there had been something off about his friend lately, and sometimes he couldn’t help but feel the worse.

“Oh, you have family here? Well, sorry to break up the reunion, Stan, I never realized Jews got together for Christmas.” Richie laughed at the notion.

“We’re sitting shiva for my Aunt Bonnie,” Stan told him.

“Oh, shit,” Richie said awkwardly. “Geeze.” 

“Richie, shouldn’t you be at home? It’s Christmas eve.”

“Of course, I was on my way to get the eggnog and I thought I’d drop by. But I should probably get going, before my mom starts to miss me. You know what a worrier she is.” 

Richie winks at Stan, and Stan looks back with a face laced with concern. He felt bad for his friend, and couldn’t imagine what holidays in the Tozier household were like. His mother always went all-out for every Holiday that the Uris family celebrated, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Richie’s mother or father had even gotten him anything. “Are you going to be okay, Richie?” He asks. 

Richie forces a laugh. “You know me better than that, Stan. It’s gonna a great Christmas. One for the books. Anyway, I’ll see you around. Good luck with your shiva.”

Richie heads back home, a little less enthused now. The cocaine feels great, and he can’t deny that, but there’s still a sadness that creeps in at the idea of spending Christmas alone, and suddenly all the holiday lights he passes on his walk back home don’t look so pretty anymore.

He misses Nicky terribly now and wishes he could call him, or see him. He thinks of all his friends, at home with their families. He thinks of Nicky, in New York with his family. Richie’s own mother leaves around six that night to go to Bangor to spend Christmas with her sister, and Richie spends Christmas Eve all alone in an empty house. He cries for a little bit, and then decides he hates feeling sorry for himself, so he cuts himself three giant lines of cocaine, snuffs them up, throws back a shot of whiskey, and spends most of the night repeating those motions as he lays in bed and listens to music. 

He does so much coke that for a second it feels like his heart is going to pump out of his chest, and there’s no way he can sleep so he keeps the binge going all the way through the next day. He needs the rush the cocaine gives him, needs the way it makes him feel, it’s the only thing keeping him from going absolutely insane in this empty house. He smokes and snorts and smokes and snorts and, on Christmas night, when his mother finally makes her way home from Bangor, she walks in on him blowing lines off the coffee table.

“Better make sure you clean that shit up,” is all she says as she heads upstairs. Even though she’s home now Richie feels a giant emptiness hanging over him, and so he fills it with more blow. By the time Nicky gets home the following evening, the bag is mostly gone, and Richie practically cries, begging for more.

Merry Christmas, Richie Tozier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the last full chapter i have written, i have the next one almost done but since i uploaded three really long ones today i'm gonna hold off for a minute.


	4. god above saw, ever in the mind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> richie has a bad month yo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for physical violence/domestic violence in this chapter. not that graphic but ya.  
> sorry this took me a minute to post i just got stuck but maybe now i can push forward lmao we'll see
> 
> update: hey guys this is a lengthy boy that takes a good chunk of time and energy to write so if you like the story and want to see it continue please show me with kudos/comments/bookmarks!! i'm a college student & i have to jobby so i'm saying i don't have a lot of free time and i don't want to waste my time writing a story that nobodies reading tbh. the reception on this story has been pretty low and i dont feel strongly enough about the story to want to continue it just for my own sake so if you like it and want me to keep going please let me know!! i'm going to see how people respond to the next chapter and then decide if i wanna just discontinue it. sorry if im letting anyone down :< like i said i just don't have a lot of free time i don't wanna waste it shouting nonsense into the void

January

It’s only the first day of the New Year and already Richie can’t believe his rotten luck; he really can’t. It was like he was fighting against some unseen force that just really wanted to see him miserable, and god was it a losing battle. He had only been awake for about a minute, but the flames of his life burning before him danced in his eyes. He had woken up, in Stan’s room, to Stan glaring at him, holding his bag of cocaine. Shit. It’s the first coherent thought that runs through Richie’s mind as he reaches for his glasses so he can see Stan’s disappointment in HD. Fuck. What a way to start off the new year. 

“Richie,” Stan’s voice comes out like steel, cold and sharp. “What the fuck is this?”

Richie just stares at him, stringing together the events that had led up to this situation. He had come to Stan’s for a party last night, he remembers. He remembers he brought a lot of coke, and he remembers hiding in Stan’s bathroom and doing it, this time off the back of the toilet. It was less disgusting than the school bathroom, because Mrs. Uris kept the house spotlessly clean, museum clean, and the idea of snorting coke off the toilet didn’t seem gross to Richie at all now. In fact, it seemed like a genius spot, because he could sit on the toilet while he did it. And that was classy.

It wasn’t a big party, by any means, not as big as one of Ben’s- there had been about maybe ten other kids there besides Richie. There was alcohol, however, which Richie drank in excess, never able to actually get that drunk when he was coked out and compensating for it by drinking as much as he could. He remembers how good he felt, how alive. He remembers talking to Beverly and feeling like he was able to talk to openly and freely about himself, more than he ever could before. Everything had been so fun, and he was the last one to pass out, curling up next to Stan on his bed without caring if Stan woke up and told him that was gay. Fuck, he felt so good last night, and just thinking about it made his skin start to prickle and his blood get hot; fuck, he wanted to do a line. He really, really wanted to do a line but then here’s Stan, standing in the middle of his bedroom holding Richie’s bag of coke like he just found a murder weapon and fuck he does not look happy.

“Stan-” Richie tries to speak, but Stan cuts him off. 

“So this is it, huh? This is why you’ve been acting like such a fucking freak lately? You’re hopped up on fucking _cocaine?_ ” He throws the bag at Richie as hard as he can, and it hits him in the chest.

“Stan-” Richie still isn’t able to get a word out, as Stan plows on;

“So this why you’ve been a twitchy fucking space case? Why you’re never around? Why you always sound sick? You fucking asshole,” he’s yelling, and Richie hopes there’s no one around to hear them. “I’ve been worried about you, _everyone’s_ been worried about you, and it turns out you’re a fucking _druggie?_ ”

Those words sting a little, because Richie didn’t want to see himself that way. He liked cocaine- _really_ liked cocaine. Did that make him a druggie? Was he scummy now? He pushed the thoughts out of mind quickly, not wanting to think about it. Stan was wrong. Well, maybe not wrong, but he didn’t understand. He never would, or could, understand, because his life didn’t have that hollow echoing emptiness that Richie’s had. Richie could never make Stan understand how that feels.

“I’m not a fucking druggie,” he mumbles, eyes shifting uneasily towards the door. He thinks about just making a run for it, but he feels like if he does that, he’ll lose Stan as a friend forever. He doesn’t know if he can handle that. He feels like he’s pretty damn close as it is right now, and Stan’s fury is scathing him.

“Yeah, you are,” Stan laughs, a bit hysterically. “All those times in school you seemed strung out, all the sniffing. The reckless behavior. It’s been coke the whole time. You do this shit every day, don’t you?”

Richie says nothing, his face burning with shame as he studies the pattern of Stan’s sheets. He can’t look his friend in the eye right now. There’s no way. 

“Who are you getting it from, Richie?” Stan demands. When Richie still doesn’t answer, Stan storms over to him, pinning him against the pillows and shaking him a little. 

“Christ, Stan, get off me!” Richie’s yelling now, not caring anymore since apparently Stan had no issue with it. “It doesn’t matter! You don’t even know him!”

“It’s that kid Beverly told me about, isn’t it? She saw you leave with him at a party.” Stan’s voice is so accusatory. “Ricky.” 

“It’s Nicky,” Richie corrects, and then realizes he just gave himself away. _Shit, well, fuck._ He wishes he could learn to keep his mouth shut. At least Stan finally lets go of him, though he remains seated on the bed with little space between them in a way that makes Richie feel very small. 

“How could you even associate with a dirtbag like that?” Stan sounds disgusted, like they’re talking about something absolutely repulsive. 

“Look, I don’t know what Bev told you, but he’s a really nice guy,” Richie once again fails at keeping his mouth shut, giving himself away. Stan eyes him suspiciously for a second and then it’s like a light going on in his head. 

“You do more than by drugs from him, don’t you?” He accuses, his voice lower now, his eyes piercing. Richie doesn’t say anything, but he can feel heat creeping onto his face. After a moment of silence, Stan says; “tell me you’re not fucking him.”

Richie should say no, but he doesn’t say anything. 

“Oh my god,” Stan sounds both disgusted and completely taken aback. “Oh my god. You’re a cokewhore.” 

“Jesus Christ, Stan,” Richie finally spoke, a little furious now. “It’s not like that at _all_ , fuck. Give me a _little_ credit, okay?” 

“So what’s it like then, Richie?” Stan wants to know. 

“He’s like… We see each other. He’s my boyfriend.” Stan just stares hard at him before laughing, a malicious type of laugh. 

“You’re really something else, you know that Richie?” He definitely did not mean that as a compliment. 

“Fuck you, Stan. Like you’re so perfect.” 

“At least I’m not a _druggie,_ ” Stan hisses at him. “At least I didn’t lose my virginity to the guy who sells me _cocaine._ ” 

Richie can’t take it anymore after that. He stands up off the bed abruptly, still holding onto his bag of cocaine, and starts crying. “You’re such a fucking asshole, Stan,” He chokes out, grabbing his backpack off the floor and wiping furiously at the tears on his face. 

“Takes one to know one,” Stan says back dully, not making any move to stop Richie or console him. 

“Seriously, fuck you,” Richie sobs out, frustrated, before turning and storming out of the room, and out of the Uris house.

He chain smokes as he walks home, replaying the events over and over again in his mind and getting all the more angry. Who did Stan think he was, talking to him like that? Maybe Richie wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t think he deserved that. The way Stan spoke to him, the way he _looked_ at him, it was like Richie was suddenly dirt in his eyes. Subhuman scum. _Cokewhore_ , Stan had called him. What the fuck did Stan Uris know? He had a perfect fucking life. His parents were loaded with money, and beyond that loved their son dearly. His house was big and always warm and always clean, his mother was always sober and his father always came right home after work. Stan Uris couldn’t understand Richie’s life if he tried, so who was he to pass judgement? Stan Uris didn’t know anything about Nicky O’Donald, or his relationship with Richie, so who was he to make assumptions?

Richie’s blood felt like poison in his veins, and he had never wanted so badly in his life to get high. The first thing he does when he gets home and up into his room is rip open his bag, dumping all the powder in it onto his desk and cutting it into three big lines. He blows them one at a time, feeling a little bit better each time, and when he’s done he leans back in his desk chair and listens to his clock tick for a minute and thinks about how much fucking _better_ he feels now. Then, he calls Nicky.

\----

The next day, Richie wakes up with bloodshot eyes and feels absolutely horrible about himself. He lays in bed for a good hour or so, thinking about Stan and feeling sorry for himself. His anger at his friend is fading, and now all he can think about is how badly he fucked up. Guilt and self hatred are eating away at him, gnawing his throat and stomach like a rat. He finally slumps out of bed and makes it downstairs to the living room. His mom is already awake and he can feel her eyes following him. Knowing she only pays attention to him when she needs a target, he’s not exactly surprised when she calls out to him, “You look like shit.” 

“Thanks, Mom,” he grumbles, making his way into the kitchen. She follows him in. “Real nice of you,” he sets about making coffee, trying to ignore his mother, standing under archway separating the two rooms and watching him. 

“Have you heard from your father?” She asks, while he watched the coffee maker, wishing it would hurry up. He had done everything Nicky had given him to hold him over the night before and he was irritated, especially knowing that he couldn’t see Nicky until much later that evening, because he had to make an out-of-town run. 

“No,” he deadpans at her, breathing in the smell of hot coffee bean. 

“He’s a piece of shit. All the men in my life are pieces of shit.” 

“Gee, Ma, should I break out my fucking violin for you? What a sad story.” The moment the words leave his mouth Richie’s regretting him, and before he has time to process anything his mom has made it across the room and is shoving him roughly into the counter. She slaps him and he blinks at her, eyes wide. He can taste blood in his mouth.

“You better watch your fucking mouth,” She cusses at him. “I’ve just about had it with your shit, you little fucking junkie.” _Had it with what?!_ Richie screams in his mind. _Me cleaning the house all the time, buying groceries, buying your stupid cigarettes?_ He doesn’t say anything, just stares at her, suddenly feeling incredibly raw and vulnerable. Thick tears rise up in his throat and he swallows them down, refusing to cry in front of her. 

She glowers at him for a minute more before turning and storming over to the fridge, grabbing a can of beer out of the vegetable crisper. “You need to get your shit together, Richard,” she tells him, before finally leaving the room. 

Richie just stands there for a long minute, struggling not cry. He can hear that his coffee is done, but he doesn’t care anymore. It takes him a second before he’s realizing he’s dripping blood onto the floor, and when he makes into the bathroom to look in the mirror he finds his lip split open. His mother must have gotten him with her ring. He straightens his glasses and studies himself in the mirror for a second, decides he looks horrible, and starts crying. Without really being aware of what he was doing, he sits down on the edge of the tub, burying his head in hands. He’s doing his best to be quiet, because the last thing he needs his mother hearing him and coming to the door to mock him for crying like a bitch. Eventually thoughts of his mother turned to thoughts of Stan, and he still couldn’t get over how badly he had fucked that up. He wanted so badly just to talk to Stan, to know things were okay, but he didn’t know if Stan would ever even speak to him again. The two boys had had their fair share of fights, but none that brutal.

Once Richie’s able to regain his composure he decides he needs to try, even if it means going to Stan’s house and lying to his face. And so that’s exactly what he does, walking in the direction of the Uris household with a tear soaked and blotchy face. Stan answers the door and looks surprised to see Richie there, but he only stares at him and neither boy says anything. Richie suddenly feels very self conscious, aware of how he must look at the moment, and sniffs.

“Can I come in?” He asks quietly, and although Stan doesn’t say anything, he moves aside, letting Richie in. The house is empty, and Richie realizes his parents still aren’t back from the weekend trip they took, the one that had left Stan’s house available for the party.

The two sit on the couch in silence, and Richie doesn’t know where to start. Stan’s just staring at him, and Richie thinks he’s staring at the cut on his lip. Running a shaky hand through his hair Richie says, “My mom hit me,” then laughs. Stan’s expression remains blank and he doesn’t say anything, so Richie starts crying, instead. 

“Fuck, Stan, I’m sorry,” he says between sobs. “I’m so fucking sorry.” He takes off his glasses and wipes his bleary eyes, unable to look at Stan but feeling his gaze on him.

“Richie…” Stan says quietly, trailing off. He hates seeing Richie this way, but he’s so fucking hurt by what Richie’s doing that it’s hard to find the right words to say. “You need help.”

“I know,” Richie sobbed. “I know I do. I need to quit.” It was a lie, and it felt strange coming out of his mouth because it was so opposite of what he actually believed. It was hard to see the coke as being a problem, when it made him feel so good, and he had no desire or intentions of quitting. He knew that; that wasn’t what this was about. This was about making Stan believe he going to quit, for the sake of their friendship. Maybe he felt horrible and dirty lying to his friend, but it was a lot better than the alternative, which was losing him. “I’m going to quit,” he tells Stan, still crying.

This seems to soften Stan a little. “You’re going to quit?” He says it like he doesn’t know if he should believe it, and finally Richie looks at him, blinking through the tears. 

“I don’t want to lose you,” he hiccups. “I don’t want to lose anyone. It’s not worth it.”

“I just don’t understand why you started,” Stan tells him, and Richie looks away again.

“It’s so fucking complicated, Stan,” he says tearfully. 

“I would feel better if you’d at least explain yourself a little, Richie.” Stan watches as Richie sucks in a great breath, wiping at his face, and looks like he wants to say something but doesn’t. So Stan pressed; “You can’t keep shutting yourself out from everybody. How am I supposed to trust you if you won’t even tell me what’s going on? I have no idea what’s going on in your life anymore, Richie. You’re doing drugs, you lost your _virginity_ and didn’t even tell me…”

“I know,” Richie says thickly. “It’s just. Hard. To talk about.”

“Try.”

“It’s just- fuck, I don’t know, Stan. Everything this year has been going so fucking wrong. School is shit, my parents are shit, I just-” he breaks off for a second, having to collect himself. “I hate going home, Stan. My mom drinks a lot.” This wasn’t news to Stan, but it’s the first time he’s ever heard Richie actually admit it. “I hate being in that house, I hate going to school, I hate waking up every day and having to be me.” Richie’s still crying as he rambles, and Stan just lets him. “I started doing the coke because it made me feel better, about everything.” He finally trails off and glances at Stan, can see the information he’s absorbed setting into his face.

“Richie, why didn’t you talk to anyone sooner?”

“I don’t know,” Richie answers, which isn’t necessarily the truth but a lot easier than trying to explain his twisted and self loathing thought process. “I really don’t know. But, I don’t want to be like this anymore, Stan. I don’t want to do drugs anymore.” It’s all lies, pouring out of his mouth, and he feels horrible but luckily Stan’s not catching them. He seems to believe Richie is being pretty genuine and he sighs, his pale blue eyes trying to lock into Richie’s.

“I just hate that you feel like you had to turn to drugs instead of talking to me,” Stan admits. “Or Eddie, or Ben, or Mike, or Bev. You hide from your friends, Richie.”

“I know,” Richie miserably agrees. 

“Maybe part of the reason everything is so bad for you is because you’re trying to go through it alone?” Richie doesn’t want to admit to himself how much the words resonate with him; he shakes his head.

“I just don’t want my problems to be everyone else’s problems,” he says slowly, after a second.

“Richie, we care about you. I care about you. I’d rather you come to me with your problems than to run to _Nicky._ ” 

“I know,” Richie agrees again. “I’m not going to see him anymore, Stan, I swear.” It’s another lie, and he’s practically burning with shame, disgusted by what a filthy liar he was, but fuck, at least it seemed to be working, at least Stan actually seemed to be buying the crap that spewed out of his mouth like a running faucet. He looks at Stan, hair clinging to his face where his tears had dampened his skin, and asks in a watery voice; “Do you hate me?”

That seems to break Stan completely and he sighs, leaning towards Richie and pulling him into a hug. “I don’t hate you,” he whispers, resting his chin on the top of Richie’s head while Richie cries, once again, into his shirt. “I’m just worried about you.”

“I’m sorry,” Richie sobs into his chest.

“I know,” Stan tells him, rubbing small circles on Richie’s back. They stay like that until Richie stops crying and manages to pull himself away, the two parting slowly, like molasses. 

“So, no more coke?” Stan asks, looking Richie in the eye. Richie swallows heavily and nods. “Promise?”

“I promise,” he tells Stan, feeling sick with himself. _Filthy liar,_ his mind hisses at him. _Filthy disgusting liar._ He ignores the voice, and when Stan invites him to stay for lunch he gladly accepts. 

By the time he leaves Stan’s house that evening, he’s feeling a lot better. Sure, he had just lied his fucking ass off to his best friend, but fuck, at least they were okay. At least Stan wasn’t done with him. Richie was starting to feel pleased with himself that he was able to patch things up so smoothly, and when he gets back to his house Nicky is, to his surprise, already in the driveway waiting for him, leaning up against his car and smoking a cigarette. 

Richie grins when he sees Nicky, glad now that he didn’t have Stan walk him home. “I thought you weren’t going to be back until later?” He asks as he gives Nicky a kiss. Nicky smirks a little.

“Came home early,” he tells Richie. “Wanted to see you. You gonna invite me inside?” Richie’s blood runs a little cold, and his eyes flick to his house. He thinks, for a second, he can see his mom watching them through the blinds, but he’s not sure. 

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea,” he says hesitantly, and Nicky raises an eyebrow at him. 

“You don’t wanna invite me in, that’s cool. That’s fine. I take it has something to do with the cut on your lip?” Richie’s hand instinctively flew up to his mouth to feel the little slice, right by the side of his front teeth. He doesn’t say anything at Nicky smiles at him. “C’mon,” he says, with a little laugh. “Get in the car. We’ll go park somewhere.” 

And so they do, and when Nicky breaks out the baggy of white powder again Richie is so happy he could sing. The two talk, and make out, and Richie is is feeling pretty decent and pretty high when Nicky drops him off.

When he walks into the house, he finds his mother standing by the front door, waiting for him.

“So that’s how it is,” she says, slamming the door behind Richie before he even has a chance to react. She’s usually passed out by this time so she startles him and he jumps a little, swinging around to look at her.

“That’s how what is?” He questions wearily. He’s still pretty hopped up on coke, but this is deflating his mood a little. 

“That’s how you’re getting all your drugs. You suck his dick?”

“Jesus christ, no!” 

“Don’t lie to me, you little _faggot._ You’re disgusting.” 

Richie just stares at her a second, before turning and hurrying up the stairs. He can hear her following behind him. “Richard, don’t you dare run from me!” He makes it to his bedroom and slams the door shut, locking it behind him. He can hear her stopping in the hall, and then the doorknob jiggles. “Open this door you little trash whore,” he hears her spit from the other side. 

“Go to bed, Mom,” he calls back. “You’re drunk.” Twitching, he dumps some of the coke Nicky gave him onto his desk, cutting himself a couple lines. She’s still outside pounding on the door and hurling insults at him, but the more he snorts the easier it is to ignore her. Eventually she gives up and retreats somewhere else, and he’s left lying in bed, thinking of Stan and Nicky and his mother and wondering what the absolute fuck his life is coming to.

\----

The next two weeks roll on pretty smoothly, all things considered. It’s been a delicate balancing act for Richie, trying to keep both his friends and Nicky and his cocaine in his life. Sometimes he feels like the world’s best actor, but not in a way that makes him feel good. He wants to be proud that he’s got Stan convinced he’s off drugs, but he doesn’t. He just feels hollow and empty, and the only way to fix that is by doing more coke, which he does, in excess. Nicky notices, of course, and brings it up to Richie one night, in the middle of the month, while the two of them are sitting in Nicky’s bedroom.

It wasn’t often Richie went over to Nicky’s houses, because Nicky’s father was a miserable drunk, but every so often he went on hunting trips which usually meant Richie stayed the night and slept in Nicky’s bed. Richie liked Nicky’s house, because it was a bit grungy and littered in beer bottles and reeked of cigarette smoke and all around reminded Richie of his own home, which he found oddly cozy. The two are laying in bed together, sharing a cigarette, and Richie is begging a rather irritated seeming Nicky for another line.

“Christ, Tozier, are you trying to blow through my whole supply?” He snaps, scowling when Richie starts to pout. 

“Nicky, please,” It feels awful and degrading, begging for cocaine, but fuck Richie is so desperate. He looks at his boyfriend with tears in his eyes, pleading.

“Fuck, fine, alright. Christ.” Nicky sits up with a huff and opens up the drawer of his nightstand, pulling out his stash. “You’re desperate for this shit, man. You have a problem,” he tells Richie as he cuts a line for him and hands him a straw. Richie snorts the line like a drowning man taking a breath of fresh air, like his life depended on it. He feels a little better now, and he leans in to give Nicky a kiss, but the taller boy pushes him away. Richie blinks, confused and a little hurt.

“You’re not just fucking around with me for the coke, are you?” Nicky asks, and it catches Richie off guard. He stares at his boyfriend with his mouth hanging open a little, shocked Nicky would even insinuate that. 

“Of course not,” he says quickly. “Nicky, I love you.” 

“Then why don’t you act like it?” Nicky snaps. “I hate how desperate you act, all the fucking time. Like a coked out slut. You’re blowing through mountains of my shit, Richie.” His words sting, and Richie feels the tears return in his eyes. He looks away, unsure of what to say. “You act like the whole world’s going to come crashing down if you have to go more than a couple hours sober. I mean, Christ, if I stopped supplying you, you’d probably be out blowing any guy you could find who’d throw you a gram.” 

“That’s not true,” Richie chokes out, feeling incredibly hurt. Sometimes Nicky was just this way, sometimes Nicky just talked to him this way, and he both relished in it and despised it. He finds himself thinking back to Buddy, who was so sickeningly nice, who treated Richie like gold. Maybe it wasn’t so bad that Nicky talked to him this way. Hadn’t he decided it’s what he deserved? Wasn’t this side of Nicky, this nasty and sometimes seemingly dangerous side of him, part of what drew him in in the first place? He had wanted to be with someone who made him feel human, and he had gotten his wish.

“It’s not?” Nicky’s watching him so intensely Richie can feel it. 

“Of course not.” 

There’s a moment of silence between the two, and then Nicky has Richie pinned down on his back, staring up at him. “Good,” says Nicky, as he runs his hands over Richie’s torso, putting a painful pressure on his ribcage. “Because you’re mine.”

 

“I’m yours,” Richie agrees, his eyes wet. He’s watching Nicky in an almost hypnotized  
state, and Nicky puts even more pressure on his ribs, watching the way Richie flinches and winces. 

“And I’m bigger than you,” Nicky carries on. “I’m stronger than you.” Even more pressure, and this time Richie cries out. “I could break your ribs if I wanted to.”

There’s something burning behind Nicky’s eyes that Richie’s never seen before, and he actually feels a little scared. Nicky’s never been rough like this before, and the weight of his hands over Richie’s ribcage is making the smaller boy extremely nervous. 

“Nicky-” he starts, unsure of what he’s even going to say, but Nicky stops him. 

“Shh,” Nicky says. “Don’t talk.” He applies more pressure again, and Richie cries out again, this time starting to cry.

“Nicky, you’re hurting me,” he whimpers, but Nicky ignores him. He pushes down hard, so fucking hard Richie’s sure one of his ribs are going to break, and lets go. Richie screams at the pain, thrashing underneath his boyfriend. “Stop!”

“You’re mine,” Nicky whispers in his ear. “I own you.” 

“Yes,” Richie agrees with a frustrated sob. “Nicky, please, you’re really hurting me.” Finally Nicky let’s go and rolls off Richie, and Richie sucks in a deep breath, relieved to have all that pressure off his rib cage. He’s still crying, terrified, and Nicky just turns from him and starts cutting them lines on his nightstand like nothing had ever happened. The rest of the night goes on like normal, and after enough coke Richie is finally able to shake the feeling of _wrongness_ that set itself into his bones. 

The next morning, when Nicky drops him off, his whole body is sore, especially his ribs.  
When he slides out of his shirt to get in the shower he notices a big purple bruise blooming across his ribcage and he runs his finger over it, thinking back to that moment last night and how scared he had felt. He decides it’s one of those things that’s better not to be thought about, and soon loses himself under the hot spray of the water. 

\---

Bill stared, wide eyed, at Beverly Marsh. He was trying to wrap his head around what she was telling him, or understand why. It was a hard thing to let sink in. “Richie’s doing coke?” It’s flat; he’s trying to sound like he doesn’t care. 

“He’s getting it from Nicky O’Donald.” Bill knows vaguely of Nicky, who had once been in his church youth group. He knows Nicky had always been trouble. “I’m pretty sure they’re, like, _together_.”

Suddenly Bill’s blood runs cold. Last he had known, Richie was dating the ever-pleasant Buddy Hollandaise. Bill couldn’t stand Buddy but there was no denying he was an all around warm, caring, well put together individual. Nicky O’Donald was the exact opposite of everything Buddy stood for. He was unpredictable, crude, always doing something illegal. He lived in a junky house in the bad part of town, with broken windows and tires laying around the yard. He sold drugs. He was, by no means, someone Bill had ever expected Richie to associate with. The idea that Richie was with this guy, well… 

It made Bill madder than it should have, and maybe not for all the right reasons. 

“B-Bev, why are you telling me this?” He feels angry and a little sick to his stomach. He doesn’t understand it, doesn’t want to think that Richie would sink that low, doesn’t want to care. He hates that he does. He wants to be normal. The way that he feels about Richie isn’t normal, but god that’s way too fucking hard to admit. 

“Bill, I know you care about him. I mean, I know that you like him.” 

“What?” Bill stares at her, shocked. “T-That’s not true.” She rolls her eyes at him. “I-it’s not.”

“You’re afraid to admit it to yourself,” she tells him, and he glares at her.

“Y-you don’t get to d-decide for me.”

“You’re right. I don’t. But, I think you care about Richie. I think you like Richie. I don’t think that I’m wrong. And I think Richie likes you too.” 

“I-I’m not g--g-gay.” Bill felt like he wanted to throw up. He was confused, upset, furious, all at the same time. _is Richie’s fault,_ he tells himself. He thinks of Richie going out with Nicky, doing drugs, fooling around, and wants to scream. 

“Whatever you say. You could help him, Bill.” At this, Bill looks away, uneasy. He tries to sound impartial;

“N-no way. I d-don’t want to talk to him, B-Bev. I don’t like him. I d-don’t _care_ about him. I don’t care what he’s d-doing.”

“You’re not that great of a liar.”

“Y-you’re deluded.” 

“Fine,” Beverly sighs, getting up to leave. “Say what you want. All I’m saying is, you could probably fix this. And I think you owe that to him.”

“I d-don’t owe him anything.”

“Sometimes you’re a real asshole, Bill,” She says pointedly. “Just forget I even said anything.” And with that she storms off, and Bill is left to think, and strew, and dissect the conversation in his head. His stomach feels sick and bubbly. His skin feels hot. The more he pictures Richie being with Nicky, the angrier he gets. The more he pictures Richie doing coke, which he guesses Nicky got him into, the angrier he gets. He wishes Bev hadn’t said anything, and he supposes she’s probably wishing the same thing right now. Beyond the burning jealousy, burning fury at what Richie was doing, was the underlying fact that he had feelings for Richie he wasn’t ready to admit. And Beverly had struck a sore nerve by bringing that up, and it only contributed to Bill’s increasingly horrendous mood. 

This mood carried through over the weekend, and by the time Bill saw Richie on Monday morning he had spent way too much time thinking of all the things Richie was probably doing with Nicky, and being vexed over the fact that he was even worried about it to begin with. When he saw Richie it made him boil with anger all over again. Stupid Richie with those stupid beautiful blue eyes and those stupid pink pouty lips. Stupid Richie with his stupid penchant for cock and his stupid drug problem. He couldn’t help but glare daggers at his ex friends, and after a moment Richie seemed to notice, eyeing Bill wearily. 

The way Bill was looking at him was making him uncomfortable. 

“Do you have a problem?” He finally asks, quietly. The hallway is busy and no one’s paying attention to the two boys, no one’s picking up on the tension Richie is currently drowning in. 

“N-no. I just heard about your little, y-you know, habit.” He puts a finger up to his nose and plugs one side and sniffs, imitating the act of snorting. Richie’s eyes go wide for a second, then narrow in anger. 

“That’s bullshit. And none of your business. Anyway, I thought I was too gross to talk to anymore. Since when were you interested in my personal life?”

“Since you started s-sucking dick for d-drugs,” Bill retorted, and Richie’s whole face went red. He looked angry and embarrassed and hurt all at the same time, and Bill couldn’t tell if he felt good or bad about it. 

“I don’t do that,” he hisses at Bill. “You’re so disgusting. Fuck off.” He slams his locker shut and brushes past Bill, trying hard not to look like what Bill said bothered him at all even though his hands are shaking and his heart was beginning to race. He rushes into the bathroom, pushing into the handicap stall.

It’s almost dizzying, the hurt and anger he’s feeling. Those words, especially coming from Bill, were biting. He loved Bill and Bill thought of him as dirt. Probably less than dirt. He thought Richie was disgusting, and fuck, Richie didn’t even know if he was wrong anymore. He was so tired of everything. He was so tired of people implying he was only with Nicky for the drugs, because he liked Nicky. Right? He had to have. Of course. He had lost his virginity to Nicky. He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t like Nicky, right? He wouldn’t have done that just for the drugs, right?

With a churning stomach Richie realizes he doesn’t know anymore, and he’s so upset as he clumsily dumps some cocaine onto the toilet paper dispenser that he doesn’t even notice he hasn’t slid the lock on the door all the way into place, or that someone has entered the bathroom.

He uses his straw to snort two quick lines, exhaled in relief, and then jumps when a voice behind him says “Oh my god.” He turns around, startled, and stares into the horrified and revolted face of Eddie Kaspbrak.

“Oh my god,” Eddie repeats, taking a step back. Richie is flooded with guilt, it tastes like blood in his mouth. The hurt etched into Eddie’s face makes it feel like his heart is breaking.

“Eddie-” He takes a step towards the boy, reaching his hand out as if to touch it, and Eddie pedals backwards. 

“Don’t talk to me,” Eddie clipped, his voice laced heavy with disappointment and disgust. 

“Eddie, wait-”

“I’m serious Richie, don’t.” With that Eddie storms out of the bathroom, leaving Richie alone to process what just happened as he stares blankly at the door his friend had just left through. He had already been feeling sick and now his stomach gave a violent lurch and he pushed back into the stall he had just done the coke in, collapsing to his knees and retching violently into the toilet.

He throws up everything he has in his stomach, which wasn’t much, until it’s just foamy bile coming out. His mouth tastes like rust and acid and tears are dripping down his nose and into the toilet bowl. He stays like that for a while, hunched over and crying, wondering why he had to fuck everything up so badly. 

When he sees Stan and Eddie after school, walking home together, they both shoot him a steely glare and ignore him. He goes home and goes up to his room and cries and waits for Nicky to call, and as miserably as the month had started, it ended.


	5. biding your time on the other ocean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> oh jeeze

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay this is by far the darkest chapter yet i think?? but its also the darkest chapter there's gonna be if that's any consolation. like this is the tipping point it's going to get better from here. hes sunk his lowest so its gotta get better for him. oh boy im sorry.
> 
> tw for::: self harm (kinda), attempted suicide, and graphic (domestic) violence
> 
> ps: there are mad easter eggs in this story and one day i'm going to make a post on tumblr explaining all of them but in this chapter there are lyrics to my fav la dispute song and im saying if u can find them ill write u whatever u want

February

Sitting at the kitchen table, at the chair nearest the phone, and staring out the window above the sink, all Richie can think about how _alone_ he feels. How terribly, helplessly, alone. The sun is going down and the sky outside is bruising into a shade of dark blue; Richie can see the frost crystals chunking up on the window. It’s cold in his kitchen and quiet in his house. All he can think about is the voicemail Stan had left him, and he has to stop himself from getting up and listening to it again.

He knows he should just delete the stupid thing, really. He knows there’s no reason to keep it saved on the machine other than to torture himself with it. It’s not going to do him any good to have it lingering around, just a button click away. But he can’t bring himself to, and Stan’s words keep echoing around in his mind like lyrics to a catchy song. Only music usually makes Richie happy, and what Stan said had broken his heart.

“Richie, yeah,” Stan had started out, clearing his throat awkwardly. “I guess you probably realized we’re not talking to you.” He had paused for a moment here, and the next words that had come through the static of the phone were harsher, angrier, thick with betrayal and disappointment. “You know, you really had me convinced. That you were getting better. I guess I really wanted to believe that you wanted to change. Or that you gave a shit about your friends.” 

That hurt because Richie _did_ give a shit about his friends. He cared about them so much, enough to know that he was dead weight, that he would only drag them down. He was like an anchor, pulling them deeper and deeper into polluted black water, and if they kept holding on to him they were going to drown. And that’s the last thing Richie wanted. 

The voicemail went on; “I care about you, Richie, and you lied to my face. You told me every day you were off that shit. If you want to run around and do drugs and sleep with scumbags, fine, but I’m not going to just stand around and watch you do it. Unless you’re _actually_ ready for help, don’t talk to any of us again. Goodbye, Richie.”

Richie really ought to just delete the stupid voicemail.

He knows everything Stan said was right and true, which only makes him feel sicker, only makes his throat burn hotter with tears. He wants to cry but it hurts so much all he can do is just sit there in shock. He wants his friends back. He wants to go back in time and stop all of this from ever happening. He wants cocaine. He wants to go running over to Stan’s, begging and pleading and crying for Stan to take him back. Try his chances lying one more time. He knows Stan won’t hear of it. Not this time. He wants cocaine. He wants to vomit. 

Slowly, without thinking about what he’s doing, he slides out of his chair and shuffles over to the phone. He turns the rotary dial slowly, and listens to it ring. It seems to go on for hours, just the hum of it ringing and phone static. There’s no answer, and eventually he hangs up. Nicky must not be home, which is unfortunate, because he’s out of blow and everything hurts so badly he’s not actually sure if he can handle it. 

All he can think about is the look on Eddie’s face, standing in the door of the handicap stall, watching Richie snort lines in a filthy bathroom like the little junky scumbag that he was. All he can think about is the disappointment, the _resentment_ in Stan’s voice coming in through the telephone wires. He can taste acrid bile in the back of his throat. All he can think about is Nicky, and Nicky’s cocaine and Nicky’s dick and Nicky’s fucking _hands on his ribs scaring the shit out of him._. 

Richie can’t stand the thinking anymore, and, barely registering what he’s about to do, he walks over to the silverware drawer and pulls it open wide. His expression is blank as he sticks his left hand in it and proceeds to slam the drawer shut on his fingers with as much force as he can muster.

The pain is shocking and sudden and hot tears suddenly spring from his eyes and spill over down his cheek. He repeats the action one more time, just as hard, and hisses in pain as he yanks his hand back and holds it close to him. Looking down at his fingers, which are already starting to swell and bruise purple, he can see his forefinger, middle finger, and ring finger have lost skin and blood is welling to the surface. He attempts to flex them but the pain is too intense and he gasps, rushing over to the sink and running them under cold water while he tries to make some sense out of what the actual fuck he just did. 

It hurts like a bitch, but with some satisfaction he finds that his half pulverized fingers give him a new, different kind of pain to focus on. One, he thinks, that is easier to live with than the aching pain in his heart that never seemed go away. He runs his fingers under tap til his skin is starting to prune, and then heads upstairs where he zones out and waits for Nicky to call and come over with some more blow.

\----

At school, Richie spends most of his time feeling like he can barely breath. Stan, Eddie, Ben, Beverly- none of them will so much as _look_ at him, let alone talk to him. There was a coldness that seemed to permeate off them, one that shook Richie deep down in his core and left him with an empty, aching feeling in his chest, his shoulders, his neck. He wished so badly that Beverly would smile at him, or that Ben would offer him some some of the Smarties Riche knew that he carried around in his backpack, or that Stan would walk home with him. All he wanted was for things to be back to normal, but that wasn’t going to happen. He had fucked everything up like he always did, and it was too late to fix it. No matter how hard he wished for it, there was no way to turn back time, and all he could do was live with the mess he created for himself. 

He spends most of the day watching the clock, counting down the hours until the end of the day, and looking for any opportunity to sneak off to the bathrooms to blow coke. If the school truant officer wasn’t such a tyrant, he figures he’d stop going altogether. It’s not like his mom would give a shit, if she even noticed. Richie wasn’t even sure if he even _had_ a mom anymore, or if he just had a talking liquor bottle that chain smoked with non-menthols. And it’s not like Richie gives a shit about his grades, because fuck, who does he have to impress? It’s hard to think far enough into the future to worry about what’s going to happen when school ends, and part of Richie wonders if he’ll even live long enough to make worrying about the future worth it. I mean, who would even be upset if he were to die? His friends, the one’s who won’t talk to him, the ones who, rightfully so, wouldn’t so much as spit on him if he were on fire? His mother, who lovingly referred to him as the “biggest mistake of my life”? Or maybe Nicky, his boyfriend, his cocaine supplier, the one who pinned him to the bed and pushed down on his ribs until Richie had screamed? Would Nicky miss him? Would it _matter_ if he did?

Richie spends his lunch periods in the very last stall of the boy’s bathroom farthest from the cafeteria. It goes without saying that he’s been disbarred from his usual position at the lunch table, and as much as he hates himself he still has too much pride to sit alone at the reject’s table, so he hides in a dirty bathroom instead. It’s not like has any appetite anyway, and at least in here he can snort cocaine and feel sorry for himself and no one has to see what a fucking _loser_ he is. 

Richie stares at the graffiti on the back of the stall door and misses his friends. 

\----

Every day Richie wakes up and the world seems to be a little bit dirtier, a little bit greyer. The snow comes in squalls and piles up in the streets. By the end of the first week of February, banks full of dirty, muddy snow are piled up on the side of the street. Everything just seems so ugly, so desolate. Richie’s house has never felt more lonely than it does now, and he even finds himself wishing his father would come home, like he had really been all that great of company. At least if his dad was there he wouldn’t be his mom’s only target. But Richie hadn’t so much as heard from Wentworth since just a bit after New Year’s, when he was still doing his whole _lie about my drug problem to my friends_ thing. 

The only one who ever calls his line is Nicky, and Richie can’t figure out why he is the way he is or why everything had to turn out so wrong or why his mouth tastes like blood and battery acid. Sometimes he thinks about marching over to Stan or Eddie’s and groveling, but he can’t. He can’t bring himself to do it. He knows they hate him now, just like Bill hates him, and why shouldn’t they? He was beyond fucked up. He was a druggie. He was a scumbag. He was dirty. He was a whore, sucking the dick of a guy he wasn’t fully even sure that he _liked_ because fuck it, why not? He was hot and had drugs. Richie couldn’t get his shit together if someone handed him a bag to put it in, and someone like that doesn’t deserve _friends_ like Stan, or like Eddie, Or like Mike or Beverly or Ben or Bill. He didn’t deserve to be cared about, he didn’t deserve to be loved. He certainly didn’t deserve any sympathy. He was a parasite, leeching off everyone, and, finally, his friends had realized that and cast him away.

_It’s a good thing,_ he attempts to convince himself. _It’s better this way. You’re not hurting anyone this way._ Well, maybe he wasn’t hurting anyone anymore, but fuck if he didn’t hurt. It was like drowning, and being shot in the chest, and being smothered under a ton of bricks, all at the same time. Every nerve in his body ached. Any time in which he wasn’t completely strung out from the coke he spends holding back tears. At least the coke helped him stop feeling, at least it made him go numb, at least he had that. 

As Richie snorts another line up his nostril and rubs the residual powder on his gums, he realizes with a sinking feeling in his stomach that _this_ is all he has left. 

\----

When Nicky asks Richie if he wants to do something for Valentines Day, Richie is a bit surprised. Part of this is because he has not pegged Nicky for the kind of person to be into cheesy holidays like this. Nicky was way too cool for commercialism, or so Richie thought. The other reason was because Nicky had been in the mood of moods lately. 

Richie couldn’t keep track of how often the two would fight- well, it was more like Nicky yelling at him and berating him than the two actually _fighting_. Richie would need some sort of spine if he wanted to do that, and he was shit out of luck on that aspect because he was a _coward._ So, Nicky had been treating him like shit and Richie had been letting him, because what choice did he have anyway? What, was he going to _leave_ Nicky? Lose his seemingly endless supply of drugs? Lose the last person in the world still _talking_ to him?

No way that was happening. 

So Richie figures that if Nicky wants to be a dick, he should just let him be a dick. He highly doubts that he can sink any lower, so why not let his boyfriend do what he wants? And Nicky has certainly been a dick lately, so when he suggests taking Richie out on a date for Valentine’s Day, the younger boy is a little bit taken aback. 

“A date?” Richie questions him. “Like, a _real_ one?” Nicky looks at him quizzically and asks;

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“No, I- I mean, yeah, I would love to go with you.” 

“Good,” Nicky tells him, and that’s that. “I’ll pick you up from your house around seven.”

\----

Valentine’s Day rolls around, and Richie is watching out his bedroom window, waiting for Nicky’s piece of shit Impala to roll into his driveway. Part of him is almost excited, because this is the first Valentine’s Day he’s ever spent with someone else, but mostly he just has a bad feeling in his stomach and the base of his throat. The kind of bad feeling he can’t explain, and can’t seem to shake. It’s the kind of bad feeling he gets when he watches his mom dump half an ounce of Rumchata into her first cup of coffee and he knows it’s going to be a long and rough night.

Nicky is running late, and Richie is starting to wonder if he’s ever going to show when hears the sound of an engine and can see Nicky’s car pulling up behind his Mom’s. He makes a beeline for the door, managing to escape before his mom even realizes that he’s leaving. The air outside is bitter cold, but Nicky’s car is warm and Richie gives him a quick kiss as he slides into the passenger seat, smiling sheepishly. 

“So where are we going?” He asks Nicky, lighting up a cigarette as Nicky looks over his left shoulder and backs out of his driveway. He’s expecting Nicky to say something like, _out to dinner_ , or _to a movie_. Maybe it was stupid to expect that, but he can’t help but feel a little disappointed when Nicky tells him,

“My friend Kev’s house.”

“Oh,” Richie says, eyes drifting out the window. Going on a romantic Valentine’s date to Kev’s house. _Nice._ Nicky gives him the side-eyes, raising a brow.

“Is that a problem?” 

“No,” Richie says quickly, and shuts his mouth. He doesn’t know why he’s complaining, or where he thinks he gets the right. He should consider himself lucky he still has one person left on this Earth who wants to spend time with him still. He knows he’s trash, so he should be grateful Nicky hasn’t thrown him away like everyone else has. It shouldn’t matter if they’re going out to a restaurant, or going to _Kev’s_ house. He should just count his blessings; it’s a miracle he hasn’t driven Nicky away yet.

“It’s just for a little while,” Nicky tells him. “We can go see a movie or something afterwards, okay?” Richie cheers up a little at this, and as the two drive along he tells Nicky about his day, and confides in him his feelings of loneliness over the fact that none of his friends will talk to him. 

“What do you need them for, anyway?” Nicky asks. “You have me.” Richie doesn’t know what to say. He can’t help but think he’d trade Nicky for Stan or Mike or any of them in a heartbeat… but the coke, well, that was more complicated. “I think you’re better off without them. I mean, on the bright side, I get to see you more, right?” Nicky smiles, and Richie knows he’s making a joke but part of him feels sick. He can’t help but think that Nicky has seemed genuinely _happy_ that Richie’s friends had all abandoned him, and it makes Richie uneasy.

Finally, the pair pull up in front of a shady looking house. The siding is a mess, the shutters are askew, even the snow covering the front lawn looks filthy. _This must be Kev’s,_ Richie thinks as he hops out of the car. _How romantic._ He can hear a dog barking somewhere inside, and he trails a few feet behind Nicky up to the door and the two stand on the porch as Nicky knocks and waits.

The kid who answers is ridiculously tall, so tall Richie has to practically crane his neck to see him. Seriously, was this kid a basketball player or something? He grunts at them to come into the house and immediately Richie is bombarded by a giant rottweiler. The dog is friendly enough, and Richie wouldn’t mind the dog trying to jump in his arms so much if the dog wasn’t so smarmy, and if the tall guy who answered the door hadn’t started screaming at the dog to “get down!”

Finally the kid pulls the dog away from Richie and apologizes. “This is Kev,” Nicky introduces, gesturing towards the tall boy. “He’s a good friend of mine. Kev, this is Richie.” 

Richie gives Kev a shy smile, and Kev grunts in return; that seemed to be his main form of communication. Richie sits down next to Nicky on the couch, taking in the unpleasantness of the area surrounding him. He had thought of his house as being on the messy side, but this was _extreme_. Beer bottles, liquor bottles, soda cans, cigarette butts and empty packs, plastic cups, and empty bags of chips were strewn everywhere you could see. Richie was pretty sure he could smell food rotting somewhere, and possibly vomit, but it was hard to tell over the overwhelming scent of dirty dog. Even the couch underneath him felt gross and sticky, and he felt like the smell of it would cling to his jacket when he got up and left. 

He had never wanted so badly to leave a place in his life. 

He lights a cigarette, assuming it’s fine to smoke in here, and sits there awkwardly and silently while Kev and Nicky catch up. Then Kev tells Nicky, a bit suggestively, that he has something to show Nicky upstairs. 

“Wait for me here, okay?” Nicky tells him, before disappearing up the stairs with Kev. Richie sits in uncomfortable silence, burying his nose into the sleeve of his shirt in attempt to block out some of the unpleasant smell of the house while he silently curses Nicky for bringing him here in the first place. 

After a few minutes Kev’s dog joins him, curling up next to him on the couch, and Richie gives him a few pets because it’s not the _dog’s_ fault he’s so mangy. He quickly wipes his hands on his jeans, grossed out by the greasy feeling. He wishes Nicky would hurry up, and wonders what the two are doing upstairs, and why it’s taking so long. He listens, but he can’t hear anything.

Even more time passes, and Richie can’t help but think that this is absolutely fucking ridiculous. He had lost track of how long he had been waiting here for Nicky to come back, but it had to be well over a half hour at this point. He had chain smoked four cigarettes, dropping the butts into the overflowing ashtray on the coffee table. How much longer is Nicky going to keep him waiting here? He starts bouncing around the idea of just going and getting Nicky himself, finding out what the two are up to. The final straw is when he spots a cockroach crawling out from underneath an old bag of Fritos and scurrying under the same couch he’s sitting on. Skeeved out and irritated, he starts making his way upstairs.

It doesn’t take him long to find Nicky and Kev; they’re in the first room he looks in. The room itself is just as big a mess as the downstairs, overflowing with beer bottles and dirty clothes. The smell of vomit is even heavier in here. Nicky and Kev are both sitting on the floor, leaning up against the wall. Kev’s head is tilted back and his eyes are shut- Nicky’s eyes are shut, too, but they slowly open at the sound of Richie entering the room and roll towards him. His sleeves are rolled up, and on the floor next to them is a needle.

Richie freezes, as the reality of what he’s seeing sets in. His gaze keeps dropping to the needle on the floor and then back up to Nicky, who he stares at, wide-eyed and horrified.

Nicky makes some kind of disorientated noise, and then smiles at Richie. “Baby,” he coos. “You want some? C’mon. Do some with me.” 

Richie still doesn’t say anything. He slowly starts backing out of the room, which seems to alarm Nicky, who, with much effort, pulls himself off the floor. Richie can hear Nicky following him out of the bedroom but he doesn’t care. His head is spinning. Everything about this house is horrible, everything about this moment is horrible, everything smells bad and Nicky just tried to get him to do fucking _heroin_ and oh my god he wants to leave.

“Where are you going?” Nicky calls after him, his voice sounding almost like he has a beer buzz on or something. Once he had gotten past the initial struggle of having to stand up he was able to move pretty quickly, all things considered, and catches up to Richie halfway down the stairs, snatching his arm just above the elbow and gripping tightly, holding him in place. Finally, Richie swings around to face him; his face is read and he has tears starting to well up in his eyes.

“Is this why you brought me here, Nicky?” Richie demands, quiet enough that hopefully Kev won’t hear them. “So you could fucking _shoot up_?”

“What the fuck is your problem?” Nicky snaps, and Richie snorts a little, trying to tug out of Nicky’s grip, which only pisses him off more. “What, you have a problem with this? The _cokefiend_ has a problem with me doing drugs? You dumb fucking whore.” At this, Richie stops fighting and sniffs, blinking away tears. 

“Just take me home,” he says softly. “Please.” 

Nicky laughs at this. “Fuck you,” he tells Richie, letting go of his arm with a hard shove. It’s enough to throw off Richie’s balance and send him bouncing down the last few steps. He lands painfully on his tailbone, biting his tongue between his teeth. He can taste blood in his mouth and immediately the tears that had been threatening spill over and he lets out a small sob because _holy fuck that hurt._ Pain is shooting up his spine and down his right leg as Nicky storms back up the stairs and disappears, leaving him sitting there on the filthy ground. After a moment Richie realizes Nicky isn’t coming back, that he’s probably back in that dirty bedroom shooting more junk into his veins, and manages to pull himself up off the floor, brushing himself off.

His whole body aches from the fall down the stairs and he can feel his mouth filling with blood as he limps his way out of the house, careful not to let Kev’s dog out. It whines and barks at him from the window as he makes his way down the walkway, spitting his blood into the snow. He barely has any idea where he is and it’s so fucking _cold,_ the sun has long since gone down and Richie has really no idea where he’s going as he just starts walking. He’s trying to process the fact that his boyfriend brought him to a fucking traphouse for Valentine’s Day, or the fact that he’s back there right now doping up on heroin. He’s trying to understand why Nicky would send him flying down the stairs, or leave him to figure out how to get home by himself in the cruelest month of winter.

It takes Richie a long time before he starts to recognize the area he’s in. His skin feels like it’s on fire, it’s so burnt from the cold, and his face is raw from crying. He figures it must have been two hours he had spent outside in the subzero temperatures before he finally makes his way back inside his house, and he immediately draws the hottest shower for himself imaginable. 

He sits on the floor of the tub and lets the water cascade down his head and his back. It stings when it hits his ice cold skin, but it feels so good at the same time he can’t bring himself to pull away or make the water any cooler. Two hours he had just spend pushing through the snow, trying to find his way home from god knows where. His hair had been frozen by the time he made it through his front door, and he had run out of cigarettes. It felt so good to be in the shower, but everything else felt so bad that the relief didn’t last long.

So this is what his life had come to. His family doesn’t give a shit about him. He has virtually no friends. His boyfriend, if you could even call him that, is at some sketchy trash filled drug den, shooting up heroin with a weird guy named Kev. He had tried to get _Richie_ to do heroin. He had shoved Richie down the stairs. He had left him there to get home on his own. His heart felt so painfully fucking hollow, and as he watched the water swirl down the drain he realized that, now that his friends were out of his life, he would probably never feel loved _ever_ again. He didn’t deserve to. He didn’t deserve anything. 

It was getting harder and harder to breath, and not because of the steam. Despite the hot water running over him, he’s shaking, and his mind is beginning to race.

_You’re a big fucking waste of space,_ a voice in his head screams at him. _Look at your life? What the fuck do you have to live for? You’re disgusting. You’re a drugged out little cokewhore, just like Stan said. You’re a giant fuck up. You’re filthy. You don’t deserve anything good. You deserve to die._

Richie just wants to scream, and he barely even registers the fact that he’s sobbing as he shuts off the water and reaches for a towel. He registers even less what he’s doing as he starts shifting through the medicine cabinet, only knowing that he wants the pain to stop, only knowing that he wants to die. All rational thoughts have flown out the window and as he pulls open a bottle of Asprin with shaking fingers and swallows an entire handful, his only goal is making everything _stop_. 

He drops the rest of the bottle on the floor, sending the little white pills spilling everywhere, and stumbled out of the bathroom. It feels like he’s on fire, but he can’t think straight, can’t even begin to fathom the extent of what he had just done. Was he trying to kill himself? He doesn’t even know, but he’s pretty sure he is. Why else would he eat a handful of asprin? Frantically, he thinks about calling Stan, or Eddie. “Hey, it’s ya boy, I might have just swallowed too many pills, hit me back-” no way. No way no way no way. He manages to pull on a t-shirt and boxes before he collapses into bed, not knowing what to do, and closes his eyes. 

It takes a while, but eventually his heart rate slows down and he stops hyperventilating and his mind isn’t racing so much anymore. He can feel the start of a stomachache brewing in his belly, but he’s too tired to do anything about it. He wonders if he should do something about all the pills he took, or tell someone, but he doesn’t have any fight in him at the moment to even attempt getting up and out of bed. With an uneasy sickness taking over him, he falls asleep.

\---

He wakes up in the middle of the night to the most painful cramps in his stomach that he’s ever felt; it’s like his insides are being twisted, and he can feel vomit trying to push it’s way up his esophagus. He barely makes it to the bathroom and collapses on the ground in front of the toilet before it all comes violently spewing out. He heaves hard into the toilet, puke pouring out his nose and mouth, white and foamy and acrid. His whole body feels like it’s roasting in an oven, like it’s so hot he just wants to rip his way out of his own skin, and tears are streaming down his face like someone had turned on a faucet. 

The retching and heaving seems to twist his body painfully, and it only grows more and more painful as less and less puke is coming out. He doesn’t know how long he goes on like that for, vomiting all of his guts into the toilet. At least he’s sure he got out all the Asprin. The last few heaves are the worst, and he’s sobbing loud enough that he’d probably wake up his mom if she wasn’t so drunk. Every part of his being hurts, inside and out, and he’s never felt so fucking raw and empty and damaged before. He curls up in a ball by the toilet, wishing he had just fucking died, and somehow manages to fall asleep.

\---

The next day Richie wakes up and tries not to think about it, just like he always does. The bathroom smells like vomit because he never flushed the toilet, so he tries not to think about it. There are still tiny pills spilled all over the floor, so he sweeps them up and tries not to think about it. A big part of him wishes he had died last night, but he tries not to think about it. _It wasn’t a suicide attempt,_ he convinces himself, dumping the pills into the trash. _I had a headache._

He makes a bagel for himself for breakfast and eats it alone, painfully aware of how low he is on coke and trying to hold off as long as he can without snorting some in case Nicky doesn’t call today. He hopes Nicky does call, because as mad as he is at him he really wants some fucking blow. For the first time, though, he can’t help but feel a little bad about wanting the blow- but, like everything else, he decides it’s best not to think about it.

Nicky does call, later that day. “We need to talk,” he tells Richie, and Richie agrees. Nicky is over about a half hour later, and since Richie’s mom still isn’t awake the two just sit in Richie’s driveway and talk.

“Look, I’m sorry about last night,” Nicky is carding a hand through his hair. Richie wonders which part he’s apologizing for, or if it’s all of it, but Nicky clarified by adding “I don’t usually do that stuff.”

After a moment, Richie caves. “It’s okay,” he says soflty. “I know.”

“I just wish that you hadn’t run off like that. We could have had some fun.’

Richie lights a cigarette with a shaking hand, staring out the window of Nicky’s car and focusing on the siding of his house. “I don’t want to do that stuff, Nick.”

“I know, I know. But you didn’t have to. We could have, like, fucked or something.” 

“Right,” Richie says blankly. “I’m sorry.” He starts thinking about those little white Asprin pills again, and then stops himself, and turns back to Nicky. “I’m sorry,” he repeats. 

“Hey, it’s okay. I’m sorry too. So I guess we’re even?” Nicky gives him a charming smile and slowly Richie smiles back. His stomach, which had been calm since he had woken up, was starting to churn again.

“Sure,” he says, although he doesn’t really understand how they’re even at all. He just knows it’s a good idea not to argue with Nicky.

“Good,” Nicky leans in and gives him a deep kiss, then pulls back with a shit eating grin on his face. “Open up the glove compartment.” 

Richie does as he’s told, only to find a big bag of cocaine in there. As they snort lines together off the center console, Richie waits for the sick feeling to go away in his stomach.

It doesn’t.

\----

It’s been the loneliest month of Richie’s life.

He’s going mad from it, really. It’s hard to find the will within himself to even climb out of bed in the morning- usually he needs a little powdered help to achieve this. He’s never felt so painfully empty and out of it, like a shell, like he doesn’t even exist anymore. It takes everything he has not to cry when he sees his old friends at school. He lets Nicky talk down to him, not caring anymore. A few times Nicky had hit him, and again, he didn’t care. It was like nothing mattered. It was like nothing was _real_. He spent most of the time feeling like he was outside of his own body, watching himself, like some kind of bad movie that he couldn’t find the remote to change or turn off. 

He spends as much time as he can sleeping and barely eats. At first everything hurt, hurt so deeply and badly that the sadness drove deep into his bones, but now he’s just numb and cold and dead inside. All he does is miss his friends, and hate himself, and wish he was dead. He thinks about the Asprin, the little white pills scattering across the bathroom floor. He wonders what would happen if he drank an entire bottle of his mom’s Captain Morgan. He wonders how long it would take to bleed out, and if he would still get into Heaven if he killed himself. But he tries not to- tries not to think about it. It’s better off that way.

Now the month is over, and he’s more zoned out than usual. Even the coke isn’t helping as much lately, and lately every time he does it he feels bad. He wonders if he could get clean, and if it would mean losing Nicky. He doesn’t want to be alone and he doesn’t know what to do anymore. But he's pretty sure he doesn't want to do cocaine anymore. He hasn't felt right about it since Valentine's Day, seeing Nicky shoot up heroin.

He’s more zoned on than usual, and Nicky snaps on it for it; they’re over at Nicky’s house again, since his dad had taken off to spend the weekend up north hunting. “Earth to Trashmouth. Are you even fucking listening to me?” 

Richie blinks, turning to face him. “Huh? Yeah. I am.” Nicky rolls his eyes at this, scowling. 

“Like fuck you are. What’s your problem today?” 

“I-” Richie stops, trying to figure out what he wants to say. Should he lie to Nicky? Should he be honest? “I don’t- I mean… Can I tell you something?”

Nicky narrows his eyes at him. “Sure,” he says suspiciously. 

“I- uh, I don’t think I want to do drugs anymore,” Richie fumbles out, and Nicky just stares at him for a moment before laughing, a bit hysterically. 

“You’re joking, right?” 

“No. I mean it.” Richie’s trying to sound more confident than he feels, and Nicky stops laughing.

“Why? What, suddenly the _cokewhore_ is too good for it?” He quips maliciously.

“Don’t call me that.” It’s the first time Richie’s ever stood up for himself, and even he’s a little surprised. 

“Excuse me?” Nicky demands, his demeanor rapidly going from amused to infuriated. 

“I said, _don’t_ call me that.” 

Richie should have known it was coming, since Nicky had been a bit looser with his fists lately, but the first hard smack across the cheek still surprised him. His glasseswent flying off his face. Normally he became submissive when Nicky hit him, but this time, as he lightly brushed his fingers over his burning cheek, he felt anger flare up that hadn’t been then before. For some reason, all he could think about was his friends.

“Don’t fucking hit me,” He snaps, trying to push himself away from Nicky. Nicky, apparently, does not like this newfound confidence because in about two seconds he’s got Richie pushed on his back on the bed, pinning him down and hitting him in the face again. This time Richie’s nose starts bleeding, and Richie yelps.

“Where’s this attitude coming from?” Nicky grinds out, grabbing onto Richie’s throat with a tight hand and squeezing hard enough to stop Richie’s breath in his windpipe. Richie is still struggling underneath him, trying to pry his hand away. “What, all of a sudden you want to get clean? All of a sudden you’re too _good_ for me? You fucking bitch.” He’s squeezing Richie’s windpipe hard enough to bruise, and smacks him in the face again. Finally, Richie manages to roll Nicky off of him, but he doesn’t have much time to make a run for it before Nicky is grabbing a handful of his hair and yanking him painfully to the floor, where he gets a good kick into Richie’s stomach and few good ones into his ribs. Richie gasps, feeling the air rush out of him; he’s pretty sure he feels one of his ribs crack. He reaches out to grab Nicky’s ankle, yanking it towards him and sending Nicky crashing to the floor with him.

The two are rolling around on the carpet, taking swings at each other. Nicky gets Richie another couple times in the face and he can feel the blood gushing. He manages to land a good punch across Nicky’s jaw, splitting his lip open, but then Nicky grabs a clump of his hair at the top of his head and starts slamming Richie’s skull into the floor over and over, as hard as he can.

The carpet is thin and the floor underneath is hard and Richie can practically feel his brain bouncing around off the side of his skulls. His teeth chatter violently, and his eyes are rolling up into the back of his head. Someone is screaming. it takes him a second but he realized he's the one who's screaming, and he tries desperately to fight back against Nicky, shouting,

“Stop! Stop! You’re going to kill me!” 

This kind of pleading seems to break through to Nicky, who finally lets him go with one final punch to the face, shoving Richie away from him with a disgusted look on his face. Richie is sobbing, blood pouring out of his nose and mouth, eye swelling shut, bruises forming on his face and in the shape of fingerprints on his throat. The back of his head was throbbing, and when he brings his fingers up to gently touch the tender spot he finds that it’s bleeding; he makes the mistake of looking down at the carpet to find more of his own blood there, soaking in, and feels dizzy. His ribs hurt, it hurts to cry and to breath and to move but fuck he just wants to get the fuck out of there, to get away from Nicky.

For a second he had honestly thought Nicky was going to kill him.

“Get the fuck out of my house, you filthy slut,” Nicky spits at him. “Get the fuck out.” Richie doesn’t have to be told twice- he just figures he should go before Nicky changes his mind and actually _does_ kill him. 

It’s incredibly painful, but he manages to stand up, scooping up his glasses and limping towards the door. Nicky’s still calling after him. “I never want to see you again, you fucking skank,” Nicky tells him. “Think you’re too good for me. Think you can defy me. Don’t come crawling back to me when you’re tweeking out and need a fix, you fucking cokewhore.” 

Richie is still sobbing when he leaves, and there’s blood soaking down the front of his shirt. If he had a mirror he would see that he looked like he was wearing makeup for a haunted house; his face was gruesome, and, beyond that, every step he took sent a incredibly sharp and terrible pain rippling through his ribs and chest. It felt like one of them was poking into a place where it shouldn’t be, and the feeling was intensly horrible. 

He tries to shut off his mind as he walks but it doesn’t work, he can’t stop crying. He’s in so much pain, and he’s so fucking cold, and he doesn’t even know where he’s going. But then, suddenly, he does, because suddenly he’s turning onto Stan’s street and even though he doesn’t exactly know what he’s going to say or do he knows where he’s going.

He rings the doorbell and waits, and it’s Stan who answers, an absolutely horrified expression quickly forming on his face

“Stan,” Richie sobs, spitting out blood as he speaks. “I-I-I want help. I really, _really_ want help.”


	6. first reactions after falling through the ice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> stan uris is a good boy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry it took me so long to get this out, i got feeling some type of way about this story after i realized i set it up to be bichie but now wish i could end it with stozier, but whatever, congratulations, i played myself. so i'll just have to deal with stan being a really good friend. 
> 
> but hey yay? things are finally starting to look up for richie.
> 
> UPDATE - 11/16/17 - PLEASE READ FOOTNOTE

Stanley Uris is no fan of hospitals. He doesn’t like the way they smell, like alcohol pads and barbicide wipes. He doesn’t like the strange, low hum of the fluorescent lights hanging over him, or the weird white light they bathe everything in. He doesn’t like the beeping of machinery, or the quiet murmurs of doctors and nurses as they shuffle around with clipboards and cups of coffee, or how there’s a woman sitting four chairs away from him in the waiting room sobbing loudly into her handkerchief. But mostly, Stan doesn’t like the fact that he’s sitting here, worried out of his mind, while somewhere down the hall Richie is getting his fucking broken nose set by some doctor.

No, Stan doesn’t like that fact at all. He’s not happy to be here. It’s late, late enough that he should feel tired, but he doesn’t. Why did hospitals always seem creepier at night? He tries not to think about it; next to him, he can see that his mother is nodding off. She’s not used to staying up this late, but it wasn’t like she was just going to dump Richie off at the hospital and run. There hadn’t even been a question of whether or not they would stay and wait for Richie to get discharged- she had brought a book with her, and the medication she took at night for her blood pressure. Stan had a book, too, but there was no way he could actually focus on it. All he can think about is how Richie had looked when he had showed up at his door, blood pouring from his nose and splashing down onto Stan’s welcome mat. 

It made him feel sick, a dizzying kind of sick. It was too much blood, too many tears. Richie had been sobbing, rusty red staining the front of his shirt. His nose was broken, his lip was split open, there were perfect finger shaped bruises forming on his pale little neck. Stan had tried to touch him and Richie had pulled away with a scream, grasping at his side. Stan hadn’t seen what was going on under his shirt, but his mother had. She had dragged Richie inside and took him to the bathroom, trying to clean him up. Stan had stood there in a stunned sort of silence for a while, before beginning to mop up the trail of blood that led from the front door to the door of the bathroom. Richie’s blood.

After a few minutes, his mother had emerged from the bathroom, ushering Richie gently along with her. He had a hand towel held up to his nose, already soaked red. He was still crying, and he wouldn’t look at Stan, which didn’t do much to make Stan feel better. “Sweetheart, get your coat,” his mother had told him, while she started searching around for her purse. “We’re going to the hospital.” 

The drive over had been uncomfortably silent, save for Richie’s sobs. Once he had finally been admitted and taken to another room, his mother had used one of the hospital phones to try and call Richie’s parents and let them know what was going on. She tried three times, but got no answer. “It’s ridiculous,” she huffs at Stan. “They don’t care whether he comes home or not.” Stan couldn’t argue with that, but it made him sad to think about. If he came in ten minutes past curfew he would get reamed; his parents would be furious at him for making them worry. Richie’s parents didn’t care if he came home, they didn’t care if he was in the hospital, he doubted they even cared that he was alive. It’s enough to make Stan feel helpless, because all he wants to do is help but god what the fuck is he supposed to do? And if he feels bad about it, he can’t even imagine how Richie felt.

About an hour after Richie was admitted a doctor finally came out to speak to Stanley’s mother. He had pulled her aside to speak privately, but she had relayed everything he told her back to Stan, with a frantic look in her eye. Richie had a broken nose, two broken ribs, and a fracture on his skull they would have to stitch shut. “Do you know what happened?” She had asked her son, a bit desperately. She was a good woman and it was in her nature to worry; Richie might not be her son, but she loved him all the same, had watched him grow up with her Stanley, had lost sleep fretting about whether or not he was okay, whether or not she should do something about the situation she knew was brewing in his home. 

Stan had only shaken his head. “I don’t know,” he tells her flatly. He doesn’t know, but he’s pretty sure he has an idea. He’s pretty positive Nicky is the one who did this Richie, and the more he thinks about it the more positive he becomes that yes, this was all Nicky’s fault, and the anger inside him stews hotter than before. Stan’s not the kind of boy to wish death on someone, but right now, waiting for his best friend to get discharged from the hospital, Stan really wishes Nicky would just _die_. If it’s wrong to wish that, he doesn’t care. It was wrong for Nicky to get Richie into drugs, it was wrong of him to ruin Richie’s life, it was wrong of Nicky to beat him up so badly he had to go to the hospital and get stitches in his fucking head. It was wrong and Stan hated him for it, hated him with every single fiber of his being. 

He tries to distract himself by watching the staticy little TV hanging in the corner of the waiting room, but it does no good. He can’t focus on the nightly news right now, not that he ever really could. His mom starts snoring softly next to him, and then startles herself away. She blinks and looks around groggily, and then her head falls and she’s nodding off again. Stan wonders why the doctors are taking so fucking long, and if Richie is okay, and when the hell they’ll be able to get out of there because _god he just wants to get out of this hospital and go home._

It seems like it takes forever, but maybe that’s because Stan has nothing to do but sit and let his worries fester. Finally he spots a familiar face, Richie’s doctor, marching towards them. He nudges his mother awake, and she rubs at her eyes and gets up to go speak with the doctor. They talk quietly for a minute, and then he turns to leave, and she turns to follow him, giving Stan a small, sad smile before she does. 

Stan waits, and waits, and waits some more. His patience finally pays off when he spots his mother again, walking down the hall, this time with Richie in tow. His nose is bandaged, and the deep purple bruises blooming under both his eyes make him look like he just went multiple rounds with a WWE fighter. He’s shuffling along with a limp, clutching at the side of his torso where his ribs were broken. He looks absolutely zombified, but Stan’s just grateful that he’s okay. 

 

The car ride back to the Uris household is just as quiet as the ride to the hospital- even quieter now, because Richie’s sobs aren’t there to fill the silence. Richie sits in the front seat, so Stan can’t see his face, and neither boy says anything. Mrs. Uris turns on the radio, trying to lighten the atmosphere a little. They both appreciate it. 

When they finally get home she leaves Stan and Richie in the living room, telling Richie that she’s going to get the guest room ready for him and get him some clean clothes to change into. Richie thanks her, his voice soft and raw, and once she’s disappeared up the stairs he sits awkwardly on Stan’s couch, playing with a loose thread on one of the decorative pillows. Stan stares hard at him, but Richie won’t look him in the eye. 

It’s Stan to break the silence first. “Are you okay?”

Richie takes a minute to answer, like it’s something he needs to think about. “Yeah,” he says slowly, eyes finally flickering towards Stan. “My head hurts.”

“Yeah, he bashed it really good, didn’t he?” When no argument comes from Richie, Stan knows his suspicions have been confirmed. He sighs, sitting down next to Richie, wrapping his arm around the smaller boy, careful not to put any pressure on his hurt ribs. Richie flinches away for a second, then seems to relax into the touch. He rests his head on Stan’s shoulder. “We have a lot to talk about, you know,” Stan tells him, and Richie hums in agreement.

“I want to shower first,” he murmurs, and Stan is fine with that, because really, Richie is an absolute mess. 

“My mom’s getting you some clothes. Do you want to use my bathroom?” Richie nods, and Stan helps him up off the couch and up the stairs to the bathroom right across from his bedroom, grabbing him a clean towel from the linen cabinet. Richie hesitates at the door, giving Stan a strange look, before asking; 

“Come in with me?”

Stan does, shutting and locking the door behind him, not caring if his mom thinks it’s odd for him to follow Richie into the bathroom. He’s pretty sure she’ll understand. His dad, maybe not so much, but he’s long since been asleep, and even if he did think it was odd it wouldn’t be the end of the world. 

Richie starts the shower, giving it time for the water to heat up, and carefully takes the bandage off his nose. Slowly he begins shucking out his clothes. Stan tries not to look but he can’t help it; when he catches sight of the nasty bruise devouring the entire right side of Richie’s upper body, he lets out a breath of air and a quiet, “Christ,” before averting his gaze again. It makes Richie feel a bit self conscious, but he forgets about it as soon as he steps under the spray of the water. It stings at first, especially the cut on the back of his head, but it also feels like the most amazing thing in the world. The water rushing down the drain turns a rusty, muddy brownish-red as the blood caked in his hair gets rinsed away. He feels numb as he watches it swirl away, and slowly he sinks down to the floor of the shower, finding it much more comfortable to sit. The sobbing starts again, soft and low. Stan can hear it, but he doesn’t say anything, just sits on the toilet and listens.

There’s a gentle rap on the door, and his mother calls into him that she’s left clean clothes for Richie in the guest room, and that she’s going to bed. “Thanks, mom,” Stan calls back. Richie doesn’t say anything, but Stan can hear him sniffling. 

He hears his mother walk away, hears her yawning in the hall. Her bedroom door opens and shuts, and he’s sure she’ll pass out as soon as her head hits the pillow; she really wasn’t used to staying up this late. The clock when they had first come in read 2:43am. 

Richie’s still crying, and Stan isn’t sure what to do. Slowly he starts taking off his own clothes, leaving them in a pile on the floor next to Richie’s bloodied ones. _I hope this isn’t weird,_ he thinks, as he pulls back the shower curtain. He doesn’t want to cross a line, but all he wants right now is to feel close to Richie. 

Richie looks up at him, a bit startled. It was nice that Stan was staying in the bathroom with him, but he hadn’t exactly expected Stan to climb into the shower with him. He doesn’t think he minds so much, though, and just scooches over so Stan has room to sit under the spray with him. Stan wraps his arms around Richie and just holds him, naked and warm, and it’s so sweet and intimate that it makes Richie cry harder. 

“I’m sorry Stan,” he babbles out over the hiss of the water. “I’m so sorry. I don’t want to be like this.”

“I know,” Stan says softly. “I know you don’t. I’m sorry. I should have tried harder to be there for you.”

“No,” Richie shakes his head, which hurts. He’s so scared and sad but Stan’s body pressed against his, Stan’s arms around him, feels so good, so comforting, he never wants it to end. “You did what you had to do. Fuck, I really fucked up Stan. I’m so sorry.” 

“I shouldn’t have been ignoring you,” Stan insists. “I shouldn’t have pushed you away.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. I did. I shouldn’t have-” Richie breaks off, struggling to find the words he wants to say. “I pushed you guys away. I shouldn’t have done that.” 

“I’ve been so worried about you,” Stan admits, pressing a little kiss into Richie’s temple. “We all have. We wanted you to get away from Nicky- but, well, we didn’t really go about it the right way, did we? Kinda fucked that up.” Richie laughs a little at this, not much, more like a puff of air, but it’s enough to loosen up the knot of guilt in Stan’s stomach.

“It’s not your fault. I shouldn't have lied to you. I should have just listened to you.”

“How come you didn’t?” It’s not mean or anything. Stan just wants to understand. He wants to understand how they got to this point, with Richie sitting battered on the floor of his shower while the hot water runs over them. He wants to make some sense of it, because he’s having a hard time. Richie had told him before that the coke made him feel better, but had Richie really been in that much pain the whole time? Why didn’t Stan notice? Why didn’t he do anything to help?

“I don’t know...I just. I don’t know. I wanted the drugs. I wanted Nicky. I wanted _something_ , fuck. Anything. I wanted to stop feeling.”

“Why didn’t you come to me, Richie? Why would you turn to someone who b- who does _that_ to you,” he gestures down at Richie’s ribs. 

“I don’t know,” Richie repeats with a sob. “It just… I felt like it’s what I deserved.” 

It breaks Stan’s heart to hear his friend say that, it really does. He pulls Richie even tighter to him, as tight as he can without hurting him, and presses another kiss into his temple. 

“You don’t deserve that. You deserve better.”

“I don’t know.”

Stanley knows it’s not going to be easy, getting Richie to believe he’s worth more than someone who drugs him out and hits him. It shouldn’t be hard, his friend shouldn’t have such low self worth, but he does. And Stan had left him alone to deal with that; something he feels absolutely horrible about now. All of this could have been avoided if he had just tried harder. He swallows thickly, his eyes flickering from the bruises under Richie’s eyes to the ones on his neck. Anger swells in his gut again; he wishes he could kick the shit out of Nicky right now. If Nicky hadn’t come into the picture, maybe Richie would still be okay. At the very least he wouldn’t have a broken nose, or broken ribs. He couldn’t be showing up at Stan’s door in the middle of the night, bleeding onto his welcome mat. 

“You deserve to be loved, Richie,” He whispers softly into Richie’s hair, and a new wave of sobs tear out of Richie’s throat. He hates feeling so vulnerable, really, and part of his brain is still screaming at him that this is _wrong_ , that he’s filth and that doesn’t deserve Stan’s kindness. He wants so badly to believe Stan, but it’s hard. It’s so fucking hard. God, why did it have to be this hard? He hadn’t asked for any of this.

“It’s hard to believe that,” Richie finally says. He looks at Stan with bleary eyes. “But I know I shouldn’t have pushed you guys away like I did.”

“Do you not think you deserve us?” 

“I didn’t want to drag you down with me.” 

That makes sense to Stan, though he doesn’t agree with it. Richie doesn’t see himself the way his friends do. He sees himself as a burden on them, like some parasitic entity draining the life out of everyone he comes in contact with. It’s hard to think that Richie seems himself like that, and it’s enough to make Stan start crying, too.

“You’re not dragging us down, you know. We love you. I love you. We want you to be happy, Richie. And not because you’re so coked out you can’t feel anything.” 

“I know. I’m sorry.” There’s too many emotions coursing through him, Richie doesn’t know what to say anymore, and neither does Stan. For a long time the two just sit like that, Stan holding Richie and peppering him with little kisses. He relishes in it, but hates himself for making Stan cry. The mixed feelings are a lot to deal with. Part if his brain if telling him to push Stan away, to run back to Nicky and the coke and the comfort he knows comes with it. It’s the same part of his brain that had led him to getting involved with Nicky in the first place. Richie is beginning to learn that should just ignore that part. Stan feels so nice, so he melts into him and tries to focus on that.

The water is starting to get cold, so they both finally make their way out of the shower, Stan helping Richie get steady on his feet when the pain in his ribs almost knocks him back down. He buries his face in the towel Stan hands him, loving how it soft it is, loving how it smells fresh and clean, like the laundry detergent Mrs. Uris always used. No matter how many times Richie washed the towels at home, they were ratty and thin and always smelled musty. 

“Why don’t you go to my room? I’ll grab those clothes for you.” Richie does what Stan suggests and stands bundled in a towel in Stan’s bedroom, waiting for Stan to return with the clothes. The two get dressed in silence, and then curl up next to each other in the bed. Richie rests his head on Stan’s chest, listening to the sound of his heartbeat. It was nice, and it was comforting. Nicky never wanted to lay with him like this, never wanted to cuddle; he only wanted to do drugs and have sex. It was nice laying next to someone without having their hands slip their way into his pants. He knows Stan would never do that to him, never do anything to hurt him the way Nicky had. 

Stan runs a hand through Richie’s thick wet curls, and Richie closes his eyes, enjoying the feeling. There’s an element of safety with Stan, one Richie isn’t used to. It’s this sense of safety he feels that pushes him to finally speak up, breaking the silence. “Can I tell you something?” He glances up to look Stan in the eye for a moment, then breaks the contact, burying his face into Stan’s shirt.

“Of course.”

Richie hesitates for a second, but pushes forward before he can lose the courage. He wants to be honest with Stan, and fuck, Stan feels so safe right now. “I think I tried to kill myself.”

Stan’s hand stops playing with his hair and goes tense, and Richie wonders if maybe he should have just kept his mouth shut. He holds his breath, waiting for Stan to do or say something. 

“What do you mean you _think_ you tried to kill yourself, Richie? When?”

“A couple weeks ago,” Richie mumbles, face still buried in Stan’s chest. “I took some pills. I didn’t mean to.”

“Jesus christ,” Stan huffs. He sounds hurt and confused, but Richie is mostly just relieved that he doesn’t sound angry. The last thing he wants to do right now is make Stan mad. He doesn’t think he could handle losing him again. “Richie, look at me.” 

Richie doesn’t like the way his stomach twists when he meets Stan’s gaze, he doesn’t like seeing the different emotions swirling around behind Stan’s soft blue eyes. He doesn’t like how weak and vulnerable it makes him feel, having to make eye contact like that. He wants to look away but forces himself not to, and he has to stop himself from wincing when Stan gently strokes the side of his face with his thumb, hoping Stan won’t notice. Stan does. “Why would you do that?” Stan asks softly, and if Richie had any more tears left in him he’s sure they’d be spilling over right now. 

“I don’t know.” Richie wonders if there’s anything he _does_ know. “It seemed like the right thing to do, at the time.” 

“How is that ever the right thing to do?” Stan questions, and Richie blinks, finally looking away. He focuses on the knob of Stan’s closet door instead.

“I was having a bad day.” 

“Jesus christ, Richie,” Stan repeats, his tone a bit scolding. Richie’s just grateful he doesn’t sound disgusted, and that he’s not freaking out right now and pushing Richie away from him. He hadn’t exactly known what to expect, but it was nice that Stan was staying calm. He can feel the hand in his hair begin to play with his curls again, and it’s soothing feeling. 

“That was the day I started feeling bad about the coke. I mean, I guess I already felt bad. But that was when I started feeling _really_ bad.” 

“What happened?” Stan asks, his voice strained but gentle. It’s hard for him, having Richie tell him all of this. It’s hard knowing his friend was in so much pain he tried to _die_ , and Stan hadn’t even been there for him. He felt sick and disgusted with himself, but tried not to show it, lest Richie mistake his disgust as being aimed towards him.

“Nicky was doing heroin. He wanted me to do some with him, but I didn’t.”

This makes Stan even tenser. Everything he hears about Nicky makes him hate him even more, and there’s a tight coil of anger in his stomach. “I’m glad you didn’t,” he tells Richie. “That’s really dark stuff.”

“I know.” Richie is quiet for a moment. “He pushed me down the stairs when I told him no. Well, it was an accident, I think. Maybe.” Stan wants to snort. _Yeah,_ he thinks bitterly. _A real accident._

“So this wasn’t the first time he put his hands on you?” 

Richie’s silence is the only answer Stan needs. “I’m going to kill him.”

“It’s not a big deal, Stan,” Richie tries to reassure him, and Stan can’t tell whether he wants to laugh or cry. 

“It is a big deal, Richie. He shouldn’t have ever fucking hit you, he shouldn’t have gotten you into drugs, you shouldn’t be trying to _kill yourself_ , and I-” Stan fumbles with his words for a second, frustrated. “I should have been there. I shouldn’t have let any of that happen.”

Richie peeks up at him now. “It wasn’t your fault, Stan. It was my own fault.”

“I don’t want to hear you say that.”

“But-”

“I’m serious,” Stan snaps. “I don’t want to hear you say that. Whatever he did to you, Richie, that’s not your fault. Nicky is a predator. He saw that you were weak, and he preyed on you. It’s not your fault.” 

Richie isn’t sure if he should believe him, but he doesn’t want to argue. “Well, it wasn’t your fault either,” he finally says. 

“Right,” Stan says, with a laugh of disbelief. He wonders if Richie knows how hard he’s trying not to cry. It takes everything he has in him to not just break down right now; he wants to be strong, and hold it together for Richie. “Sure.”

“It’s not, Stan.”

“I should have been there.”

“I was the one who pushed you away. I was the one who lied to you.” 

“Yeah, but-” Stan can’t even find the words to express what he feels. He sighs, closing his eyes and taking in a deep breath. “I should have been there,” he repeats softly.

“You’re here now,” Richie says, giving him a small kiss on the jaw. And he was right, Stan was here now, and he wasn’t going anywhere. He loved Richie too dearly to watch him dig his own grave. A silence passes between the two, and then Stan asks;

“So you’re really done with the coke?”

“I think so. I mean, I think it’s going to be hard. But I really want to be done.” It’s a big relief for Stan to hear that; it means somewhere, deep deep down, Richie still has hope in himself. And that was a good thing, a _really_ good thing.

“You have no idea how glad I am to hear you say that.” Richie smiles up at Stan, then yawns loudly, snuggling closer to the boy. It feels good to have Richie laying next to him, feels good to have Richie smile at him. For a second, Stan can almost pretend things are normal. “You really need to get some sleep, dude,” Stan tells him, kissing his forehead. He’s right; Richie is exhausted, emotionally and physically. 

He drifts off with his head on Stan’s chest, enjoying the way it rises and falls underneath him with each breath Stan takes, enjoying the feeling of Stan’s fingers toying with his hair, careful not to touch the tender spot on the back of Richie’s skull. He doesn’t dream, at least he doesn’t think he does, but it’s the best sleep he’s gotten in a long time. 

When Richie wakes up early in the morning and watches Stan sleep, he feels something that he hadn’t before. There was a glimmer of hope inside him, hope that things might actually be okay. It’s foreign and strange, but he holds onto it, and eventually drifts back off, not waking up again til Stan starts stirring next to him.

\----

Ever since that night, when Stan had brought him to the hospital, everything had been different. His friends were talking to him again, which Richie was grateful for. He has apologized, rather tearfully, to Eddie. “I’m so sorry,” Richie had told him. “I never wanted you to see me like that.”

Eddie had a lot to say as far as lectures go, and Richie felt like he was in fifth grade all over again, going through the DARE program; but he didn’t mind. He was just so grateful that Eddie had forgiven him, that Eddie didn’t think he was subhuman scum not worth the time of day. It was nice, to be accepted by his friends again, to feel their warmth and love. Sometimes it scared him, but he tried to remain open to it. _You deserve this_ , he kept repeating to himself. It was a mantra he now chanted in his head, over and over. _You deserve this, you deserve love._ He hoped if he told himself that enough times, maybe he’d finally start to believe it.

Gaining his friends back wasn’t the only thing that had changed. Richie Tozier suddenly found himself thrust into a new living situation- the day after she had taken Richie to the hospital, Stanley’s mother went over to his house to have a word with Margaret Tozier.

No one but Margaret and Stanley’s mother knows exactly what was said, but she had walked out of the house shaking her head. When she got home from her visit with Maggie, she sat down and had a very long talk with her husband, behind the closed door of their bedroom. Stan and Richie pressed their ear to the door, trying to hear something, but their voices were too hushed to make anything out. Eventually, they gave up, and about an hour later Mr and Mrs. Uris emerged from the bedroom and called Stanley and Richie into the kitchen for a talk.

“Richie, honey, how would you feel about coming and staying with us for a while?” Richie is taken aback at first, and he looks over to Stan, only to find that he looks just as surprised. “Me and Stanley’s father have been talking, and we think it would be a good idea if you were to stay here. At least until the end of the school year.” 

“Really?” Richie asks, having a hard time believing what he’s hearing. “I mean- I don’t- What about my mom?”

“Well, I spoke with your mother,” says Mrs. Uris, a bit bitterly. “She seems to be in agreement that this would be for the best.”

For a moment Richie isn’t sure what to say, and he feels like crying. He swallows hard, suddenly aware that everyone in the room is staring at him, watching him, waiting for an answer. He doesn’t understand how or why Stan’s family was so kind, or why they would want to open up their home to a lowlife degenerate like himself. The kindness puzzles him, but when he looks at Mrs. Uris’s face he knows there’s no way he can say no to her.

That night, Mr. Uris drives Richie over to his house so he can collect his things. He asks Richie if he would like for him to go inside with him, but Richie politely refuses the offer. When he enters his house, his mother is waiting for him, his clothes already packed. She’s got a bottle of red wine in her hand, and she’s crying. She doesn’t say anything, only watches as her son gathers the rest of his things into the boxes Stan’s dad had given to him. 

When he’s finally done, he turns to look at her. Her face is red and tear soaked; his face is bruised and swollen. He isn’t sure what to say. “Mom-” he starts, but she cuts him off.

“I’m sorry I’m not a good mother,” she tells him, her voice cracked and broken. “I wish I could be, but I’m not.”

“Mom, it’s okay,” Richie says softly, even though it’s really not. He hasn’t seen this side of his mother in a long time, and it scares him. He can feel guilt gnawing away at his stomach, and wonders if he’s making the right choice.

“You know, my mother wasn’t any good to me. I don’t know how to be a good parent, Richard. I just don’t.” She wipes at her face, taking a sip from the bottle. Her voice is a little bit slurred. “Mrs. Uris is very nice. I think they’ll take good care of you.”

“I think so, too,” Richie says dimly. Then his mother surprises him by pulling him into a hug- he flinches away at first, then awkwardly returns the gesture. 

“I love you, baby,” She whispers into his hair. “Be good for them, alright?”

“I will, Mom,” Richie says thickly, tears spilling over onto his cheeks. “I love you too.” She holds him for a second, then pulls away with another sip from the bottle. Richie gathers his things and loads them into the car, trying hard to stop crying because it feels like a strange thing to do in front of Stan’s dad. As the car pulls away, Richie takes one last look back at the house, only to find his mother had come out onto the porch to watch. He raises a hand to wave at her, and after a second she slowly raises her own hand, the one not clutching the wine, and waves back.

It’s the last Richie Tozier sees of his mother for a long, long time.

\----

Living with the Uris’ was quite the adjustment for Richie. He wasn’t used to having people who cared about where he was, or what he was doing. He wasn’t used to sitting down at the table for breakfast before school, or dinner in the evening. The first couple weeks feels like he’s walking on eggshells, he’s so terrified of fucking things up and getting sent back to his Mom’s. But the Uris’ are kind, they’re patient and understanding in a way Richie isn’t familiar with, and after a while things start to feel sort of normal. He and Stan are closer than ever, and Richie finds himself opening up to his friend about things he hadn’t dared utter to anyone before. He tells Stan about his feelings of self hatred, tells him how disgusted he is with himself. He tells Stan how he wished he never got involved with Nicky, how he never lost his virginity to Nicky, and how dirty he felt about the whole thing. When he’s going through withdrawal from the cocaine and just wishes he could have just one little bump, just something to get him through, he tells Stan. And Stan listens. He’s a good listener.

The two do everything together. They wake up in the morning together, and crowd the sink while they brush their teeth together. They walk to school together, and Richie is allowed to join his lunch table again. It’s nice to feel sort of normal again, even though he’s scared and everything still hurts. When the school day is over they walk home together, up Witcham street towards Florence, where Stan lived. It’s on one of these walks home that Nicky finds him; they’ve just reached Stan’s house when Nicky’s car tears up, tired squealing. 

Richie recognizes Nicky’s car immediately, and his mouth tastes like stomach acid. He freezes, terrified, and Stan stops too, looking curiously at Richie. Then he realizes what’s happening, and Nicky is suddenly getting out of the car. 

“You and I need to talk,” Nicky yells, marching towards the two boys. Richie feels like he can’t move; he’s just watching Nicky in horror. Nicky’s eyes dart from Richie to Stan and then back to Richie, glowering at him. “Oh, what’s this? You’re his whore now? That was fast, you fucking slut. You grimy bitch.” 

“Richie, get in the house,” Stan hisses at him, but Richie feels rooted to the ground, and Nicky is rapidly closing the distance between them. “Richie, get in the fucking house,” Stan’s pushing him now, pushing him up to the door, and Nicky is still screaming at him, whore this and bitch that and who the fuck did Richie think he was? 

Stan pushes Richie inside and locks the door, and Nicky, who was just behind them, starts pounding on it, hard enough that it feels like the house is shaking. Richie still can’t move, he feels petrified. He’s standing in the living room, eyes never leaving the door. He can still hear Nicky outside, yelling and swearing. He doesn’t even notice Stan leave his side until he hears the garage door open, and this is enough to get him moving. He flies to the window, where he watches the scene unfold with his mouth hanging open.

Stanley Uris is marching towards the street with his metal baseball bat in hand. Nicky turns away from the door to watch Stan, and before he has time to realize what’s happening Stan is smashing the baseball bat down on the hood of his car. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Nicky screams, starting to run towards Stan. Stan smashes the bat down on his car again, and again, and again. He dents the hood, knocks off the side mirror, cracks the windshield, smashes up the passenger side door. When Nicky finally reaches him and attempts to knock him away from his car, Stan turns the bat on him. Richie watches as Stan nails Nicky directly in the ribs with the bat, watches Nicky crumple down onto his knees with a pained wail. Stan hits him again, and then hits his car one more time for good measure.

“Don’t ever come here again,” Stan tells Nicky coldy. “Don’t ever come here again, don’t ever bother Richie again, or I swear to god, I will _kill you_.” Nicky is still just screaming in pain, clutching his side. Stan spits at him before storming back into the house, through the garage, closing the door behind him.

Richie is dumbfounded. He can’t think of anything to say when Stan finally rejoins him in the living room, just stares at him, wide-eyed and shocked. Stan’s face is flushed from anger and adrenalynn, and he drops the bat, letting it clatter loudly to the floor. “Well,” Stan finally says, breaking the silence. “Are you hungry? Do you want a snack?”

“Jesus Christ, Stan,” is all Richie can say. He can hear the sound of Nicky’s car starting up and peeling away from the house, and Stan is heading towards the kitchen now, so Richie follows him. “Did you hurt him?” He finally asks, while Stan is rummaging through the cupboards, looking for something for them to snack on. His voice is quiet.

“Pretty sure I broke his ribs,” Stan says nonchalantly. “Figured he should know what it feels like.” 

Richie sits at the table, feeling sort of numb but sort of excited at the same time. He wonders what he did to ever deserve a friend as good as Stan.

\----

By the end of the month, Richie has warmed up to his new situation. Sometimes he feels sad and guilty, when he thinks of his mom, alone in that empty house, drinking herself into a stupor everyday. But he shoves those feelings down, way down, and mostly he really likes living with the Uris’. He likes being around Stan, he likes having his friends back. For the first time in a long time, Richie actually feels _good_. 

Then, one day at school, Bill actually turns to him and smiles at him. Fucking smiles at him. Richie can feel his heart swell and he wonders if maybe, just maybe, things might actually turn out okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey folks  
> so i really really appreciate all the support of this story and i apologize it's been a while since i updated. I wish i could say i have a chapter update, but it actually looks like i'm going to be taking a hiatus from this fic for a while or possibly letting in end here or in one more chapter. I feel really bad about doing that, but my reasoning is that I was actually picked up by a publisher!!! one of my short stories is set to be featured in a weird horror anthology and i'm going to be working on a chap-book that I hope to release early 2018. this is a super incredible opportunity for me, as my name is going to be dropped to some pretty major publishers once i have my shit together, and one I certainly had not seen coming, and i think it would be a far better use of my time at this point to work souly on personal projects!! i really appreciate all the support for this story and i do apologize if i leave anyone hanging; that was certainly not my intentions when starting this fic but hopefully you understand. if anyone else would like to take on the project and finish this story, please message me.


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